Alessandro Pignotti
Alessandro Pignotti
Alessandro is founder and CTO of Leaning Technologies. They just released WebVM, a WebAssembly-powered x86 virtual machine running in the browser. Originally from Rome, he has lived in Amsterdam since 2014.
JSNation 2022JSNation 2022
21 min
Crafting the Impossible: X86 Virtualization in the Browser with WebAssembly
WebAssembly is a browser feature designed to bring predictable high performance to web applications, but its capabilities are often misunderstood.
This talk will explore how WebAssembly is different from JavaScript, from the point of view of both the developer and the browser engine, with a particular focus on the V8/Chrome implementation.
WebVM is our solution to efficiently run unmodified x86 binaries in the browser and showcases what can be done with WebAssembly today. A high level overview of the project components, including the JIT engine, the Linux emulation layer and the storage backend will be discussed, followed by live demos.