WebAssembly is neither strictly Web nor Assembly. At the same time, it is a little of both.
At the technical level, it is a new binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine, according to the WebAssembly web site at http://webassembly.org. It runs in a modern web browser, but people are naturally experimenting with this and it can now run standalone and experimentally like any other app, with support being written for the Linux kernel.
Through the use of the Emscripten tool, it can be compiled from C and C++. Emscripten is a tool written in Python that uses LLVM to transpile C++ code into WebAssembly byte code that can be loaded by a web browser.
WebAssembly byte code runs in the same sandbox as JavaScript, so consequentially it has the same limitations regarding access to the local file system, as well as living in one thread. It...
