Embrace Multi-Platform Evolution with WebAssembly

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The future of WebAssembly will likely involve the development of toolkits and frameworks that support building larger applications across various languages, breaking away from reliance solely on JavaScript. This shift allows different programming languages to better address specific web use cases. Additionally, WebAssembly enables multi-platform deployment, enhancing performance beyond that of JavaScript, which presents challenges when transitioning existing applications. Migrating from JavaScript to WebAssembly requires significant effort, as it involves rewriting code in another language to compile efficiently to WebAssembly, thus complicating the process for existing JavaScript applications.

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.