Mozilla’s latest beta version of the Firefox browser, Firefox Nightly, makes calls between the WebAssembly binary format and JavaScript faster, so it is easier to combine the two languages.

WebAssembly can serve as a companion to JavaScript in web development, taking on performance-intensive tasks. But thus far, combining the two has been hindered by slow function calls between the two languages, Mozilla says.

[ Go deeper: How to get started with WebAssembly. • What’s next for WebAssembly. • 8 projects that give WebAssembly a lift • So, What’s next for WebAssembly, exactly? | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ]

The Firefox Nightly beta makes these calls run faster than non-in-lined JavaScript-to-JavaScript function calls. Calls have been optimized from JavaScript to WebAssembly and vice versa. Mozilla also has improved the speed of calls from WebAssembly to built-ins, which are functions given by the browser such as Math.random.

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