Jordan Eldredge

I gave a talk about compiling to WebAssembly in the browser

After recieving postive feedback an my post Speeding Up Webamp's Music Visualizer with WebAssembly, I was encouraged by Colin Eberhardt, author of WebAssembly Weekly, to give a talk on the topic. I submitted a proposal to TSConf and, to my surprise, it was accepted!

The talk covers:

  • The many varied projoects that have spun out of my work on Webamp

  • Our choice to use WebAssembly, and run the compiler in the browser

  • A glimps at how the compiler is implemented

  • Some of the challenges we faced in trying to make WebAssembly fast

You can watch the video of the talk here:

For me, the highlight of the day was a comment that Anders Hejlsberg, creator of TypeScript, gave to a question in the final Q/A of the event about TypeScript targeting WebAssembly:

I thought that talk about dynamically creating WebAssembly from a little mini DSL was actually super interesting, and I think that's a very appropriate use of WebAssembly.

― Anders Hejlsberg

In many ways, this talk is a more polished version of the one I gave at the virtual meetup Speakeasy JS back in July entitled Speeding Up Webamp's Music Visualizer w/ In-Browser WebAssembly Compiler:

Thanks to Jordan Berg, author of Butterchurn for collaborating with me on the compiler, Colin Eberhardt for suggesting I give the talk, and Lauren Tan for connecting me with the excellent folks who organize TSConf.