https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/27/webassembly_intro/

Code corner Like us, you may have heard a lot recent about WebAssembly. Today, freelance software engineer Ben James walks us through its creation, its current state, and the role it will play in the future of cross-platform development.

To understand the need for WebAssembly, let’s go back to the 1990s. Netscape and Sun were in collaboration, frantically building one of the first web browsers. They had no idea of what was to come, of what would be possible in the browser in the future. They were also competing with other companies making different browsers. This combination meant that they were moving pretty fast when JavaScript was first born.