The Evolution of Application Development with WebAssembly

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This chapter explores the hybrid model of application development, focusing on Google Sheets' transition from Java to JavaScript and finally to WebAssembly. The discussion highlights the performance benefits of WebAssembly and its potential to enable multiple programming languages, like Dart and Kotlin, to run efficiently on the web. It also emphasizes the importance of compilers and the future of multi-platform ecosystems in enhancing web application experiences.

The Google Sheets calculation engine was originally written in Java and launched in 2006. In the early days of the product, all calculation happened on the server. However, starting in 2013 the engine has run in the browser using JavaScript.

Google Sheets is now one of the first products at Google to use WebAssembly Garbage Collection, or WasmGC, on Chrome.

Michael Thomas is the Multiplatform Lead for Google Workspace and Thomas Steiner is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google. They join the podcast to tell the story of why and how Google Sheets ported its calculation worker from JavaScript to WasmGC.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from information visualization to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is Head of Marketing and Developer Relations at Skyflow and host of the podcast Partially Redacted, a podcast about privacy and security engineering. You can connect with Sean on Twitter @seanfalconer.