The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced that the WebAssembly Core Specification is now an official web standard.

“The arrival of WebAssembly expands the range of applications that can be achieved by simply using Open Web Platform technologies. In a world where machine learning and Artificial Intelligence become more and more common, it is important to enable high performance applications on the Web, without compromising the safety of the users,” said Philippe Le Hégaret, the project lead of W3C. 

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WebAssembly improves web performance and power consumption by being a virtual machine and execution environment enabling loaded pages to run as native compiled code. This includes near-native performance, optimized load time and a compilation target for existing code bases. 

The developers behind the web standard, WebAssembly Working Group, also said they are working on a host of new features including threading, which provides the benefits of shared-memory multi-threading and atomic memory access, fixed-width SIMD, the option to allow WebAssembly code to directly reference host objects. Tail calls will also be enabled without using extra stack space and ECMAScript module integration will be added. 

“WebAssembly joins the many W3C standards that define an Open Web Platform for application development with unprecedented potential to enable developers to build powerful, interactive experiences that are available on any device,” W3C wrote in a post.

WebAssembly is the fourth language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser, following HTML, CSS and JavaScript, according to W3C.