WebAssembly, also known as Wasm, is a binary instruction format that can be used to build a virtual machine using a stack-based architecture. Wasm is a portable compilation target for programming language, which allows deployment on the internet for client and server applications.
The Wasm stack machine was designed to be encoded using a small and efficient binary format. WebAssembly is designed to run natively on a wide variety of platforms, taking advantage of common hardware capabilities.
WebAssembly describes a memory safe, sandboxed execution system that can even be implemented within existing JavaScript virtual machines. WebAssembly, embedded in the web will enforce the same-origin security policies as the browser.
WebAssembly was designed to be printed in a textual format. This allows for debugging and testing, optimizing, optimizing, optimizing, learning, teaching, writing programs by hand, and experimenting. This textual format is used to view the Wasm modules' source on the internet.