Best of WebAssembly — March 2026

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   Article

   Bytes by ui.dev·3w

   TypeScript 6.0 is your final warning

   TypeScript 6.0 has been released as the last version built on its JavaScript codebase, serving as a transition before TypeScript 7.0 introduces a Go-based compiler with native speed and multi-threaded type checking. Key changes include strict mode enabled by default, module defaulting to esnext, target floating to the current ES spec (es2025), and types defaulting to an empty array — a change that may break many projects but promises 20–50% speed improvements. New features include built-in Temporal API types and Map.getOrInsert support. Several legacy options like outFile, baseUrl, and AMD/UMD/SystemJS targets are deprecated or removed. The newsletter also covers pnpm 11 beta, Zero 1.0 stable release, a React useState closure gotcha, and various other JavaScript ecosystem links.

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2. 2
   Article

   Laravel News·3w

   Liminal: A Browser-Based IDE for Laravel Powered by WebAssembly

   Liminal is a browser-based IDE that runs PHP 8.4 via WebAssembly, enabling full Laravel development without any local installation or server setup. It includes a code editor with syntax highlighting (CodeMirror 6), a preview pane with Tailwind CSS v4, an Artisan terminal, and an OpenAI-powered AI agent. Notable features include shareable URLs that encode file state, GitHub import, zip export, and local folder sync via the File System Access API. Limitations include no external network access from PHP, SQLite-only database support, a fixed vendor directory, and slower-than-native performance. The project is built with Vue 3, TypeScript, Vite, and Tailwind CSS v4.

   25
3. 3
   Article

   Collections·4w

   Wasmer's Edge.js runs Node.js apps inside a WebAssembly sandbox

   Wasmer has open-sourced Edge.js, a JavaScript runtime that runs Node.js applications inside a WebAssembly sandbox using WASIX (an extension to WASI). Unlike Deno or Cloudflare Workers, Edge.js doesn't replace the Node.js API surface — it sandboxes only OS syscalls and native code via NAPI, letting existing Node.js v24 apps run unmodified. Wasmer claims it passes 3,592 of 3,626 Node.js compatibility tests, outperforming Bun and Deno on the same suite. The runtime supports V8 and JavaScriptCore, with QuickJS and SpiderMonkey planned. Performance overhead is 5-20% normally and up to 30% with full sandboxing. Notably, the project was built in weeks using OpenAI Codex. It targets AI and edge computing workloads where safely running untrusted Node.js code is a priority.

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4. 4
   Article

   Hacker News·4w

   Rewriting our Rust WASM Parser in TypeScript

   A team built a custom DSL parser in Rust compiled to WASM, then discovered the bottleneck wasn't computation but the WASM-JS boundary overhead. Attempting to skip JSON serialization via serde-wasm-bindgen made things 30% slower due to fine-grained boundary crossings. Rewriting the parser in TypeScript eliminated the boundary entirely, yielding 2.2-4.6x faster per-call performance. They also fixed an O(N²) streaming problem by caching completed statement ASTs, reducing total streaming cost by 2.6-3.3x. Key lessons: WASM shines for compute-bound tasks with minimal interop, not for frequently-called parsers on small inputs where boundary overhead dominates.

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   Video

   Code to the Moon·5w

   Rust Was Critical for SpacetimeDB

   The creator of SpacetimeDB explains why Rust was the only viable language choice for building the database. Key requirements included fine-grained allocation control (transactions must complete within microseconds, ruling out garbage-collected languages like Go), and compile-time memory safety guarantees essential for a multi-tenant environment where user code runs inside the database via WebAssembly. C and C++ were considered but lack Rust's safety properties. Zig was noted as an interesting alternative but not yet mature enough on safety.

   15

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   Article

   Bytes by ui.dev·4w

   Vite+ enters the Matrix

   VoidZero launched Void, a Vite-native deployment platform built on Cloudflare Workers, and as a result made Vite+ fully open-source under MIT license. The Vite+ alpha bundles Vite, Vitest, Oxlint, Oxfmt, Rolldown, and tsdown into a single binary (`vp`) covering the full local dev lifecycle including env management, package installation, linting, formatting, type-checking, and building. A built-in task runner with input fingerprinting for caching is also included. Other news covered: Next.js 16.2, Nuxt 4.4, @clerk/expo 3.1 with native auth components, a React-to-Svelte migration of 130k lines, a team banning useEffect, and a JavaScript quiz about Array.fill reference behavior.

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