Robert Aboukhalil :: Level up your web tools with WebAssembly ::
This talk is a deep dive into WebAssembly and how it can help you level up your web applications.
We'll start the talk by introducing WebAssembly, how it works, and how to get started using it. Next, to concretely demonstrate how WebAssembly can be used to speed up web tools, we'll consider the application fastq.bio, an interactive front-end-only web tool we previously developed in JavaScript to help biologists QC their DNA sequencing data. By compiling an existing QC tool from C to WebAssembly and optimizing the original C code, we obtain more than 10X speedup compared to our original JavaScript implementation!
We'll also cover how we can leverage WebWorkers alongside WebAssembly to maintain the UI's responsiveness, and how this enables us to more easily mount File and Blob objects onto a virtual file system.
Finally, we'll conclude by discussing rules of thumb on when to use WebAssembly, and when to avoid it.