WebAssembly#

From the WebAssembly website:

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.

With WebAssembly, developers can write parts of the extension in languages like C, C++, Rust, or others. The compiled modules can be imported and executed from the extension's JavaScript context, improving the performance of the extension for tasks that are resource-intensive, like processing large amounts of data or compressing/converting audio and video files.

Extension offers built-in WebAssembly (WASM) support. You can play around with WASM in Extension by running the Chrome Sample cookbook.wasm-helloworld-print:

npx extension@latest dev https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chrome-extensions-samples/tree/main/functional-samples/cookbook.wasm-helloworld-print

• Learn how Extension works with extensions using ECMAScript Modules.

Next Steps#

• Learn more about WebAssembly.