A cartoon intro to WebAssembly is a six-piece mini-almanach with all the basics to get you started. Lin Clark, the author of this series has done a fabulous job of getting the seemingly complex topic to be fun and informative.

1. A cartoon intro to WebAssembly

   WebAssembly is a way of taking code written in programming languages other than JavaScript and running that code in the browser. So when people say that WebAssembly is fast, what they are comparing it to is JavaScript. In this series, you will learn why WebAssembly is fast.

2. A crash course in just-in-time (JIT) compilers

   This is the second part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast. If you haven’t read the others, we recommend starting from the beginning. JavaScript started out slow, but then got faster thanks to something called the JIT. This article is about how the JIT works.

3. A crash course in assembly

   To understand how WebAssembly works, it helps to understand what assembly is and how compilers produce it. Third part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast.

4. Creating and working with WebAssembly modules

   WebAssembly is a way to run programming languages other than JavaScript on web pages. In the past when you wanted to run code in the browser to interact with the different parts of the web page, your only option was JavaScript. So when people talk about WebAssembly being fast, the apples to apples comparison is to JavaScript.

5. What makes WebAssembly fast?

   Programming with WebAssembly or JavaScript is not an either/or choice. So developers don’t need to choose between WebAssembly and JavaScript. However, we do expect that developers will swap out parts of their JavaScript code for WebAssembly.

6. Where is WebAssembly now and what’s next?

   On February 28, the four major browsers announced their consensus that the MVP of WebAssembly is complete. Even in the initial release, WebAssembly will be fast. But it should get even faster in the future, through a combination of fixes and new features.