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Ben Visness

@bvisness.me

My help comes from the Lord. Handmade Network lead. WebAssembly engineer at Mozilla. Mentor for FRC Team 2175. https://bvisness.me/ Twitter (most active): @its_bvisness Mastodon: @bvisness@mastodon.gamedev.place

38 Posts183 Follower5 Folgt
Ryan Hunt@eqrion.bsky.social · 4mo ago

We’re building a user-friendly WebAssembly language reference on MDN! Want to help make Wasm more accessible? We’re looking for technical writers and reviewers to join the project. Start here if you're interested: github.com/mdn/mdn/issu...

Create a WebAssembly language reference · Issue #821 · mdn/mdn

WebAssembly has a work-in-progress language reference. It documents 1.0 instructions, reference-types, and nearly all of SIMD. I'm filing this to track the remaining gaps to get caught up to the cu...

github.com

Michael Labbé@frogtoss.bsky.social · 4mo ago

We are fortunate to have a Handmade event in Vancouver. The format is a mix of presentations and conversations -- if striving for great software is your thing, this is worth checking out.

Ben Visness@bvisness.me · 4mo ago

On June 6 we are hosting the Handmade Network Expo in Vancouver, BC, an event celebrating software made from scratch. Among the lineup: a new game from Anton Mikhailov & @nicbarker.com, a time travel debugger by @leddoo.bsky.social, a language and IDE from @frogtoss.bsky.social, and more. (1/2)

A picture of the Vancouver skyline
Ben Visness@bvisness.me · 5mo ago

We at Mozilla feel that WebAssembly has been a second-class citizen on the web for long enough. You shouldn't have to go through JS to do everything. This is probably a lot of what I will be focusing on for work in 2026! hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/maki...

Why is WebAssembly a second-class language on the web? – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

This post is an expanded version of a presentation I gave at the recent WebAssembly CG meeting in Munich. WebAssembly has come a long way since its first release in 2017. The 1.0 version of WebAssembl...

hacks.mozilla.org

Ben Visness@bvisness.me · last yr.

Oh also I forgot to post my jam project here on Bluesky - here's Buongiorno, my tool for mapping out mDNS and DNS-SD services. It captures mDNS packets to show a graph of services being requested and advertised, e.g. printers, AirPlay, Handoff, and more.

Bild
Ben Visness@bvisness.me · last yr.

I have started to go down the compression rabbit hole. The compressor and decompressor are handwritten WASM. Uncompressed: 52MB Very stupid RLE: 182KB Slightly smarter RLE: 65KB

"Very stupid RLE", where runs of zeroes are collapsed but individual letters are spaced out by four bytes each"Slightly smarter RLE", where long runs of unique characters are contiguous
Ben Visness@bvisness.me · last yr.

Sometimes you spend weeks on a performance optimization to get 0.5% faster. Other times you spend a day tweaking your GC code and get 15%+ faster.

Spreadsheet showing results from a Flutter benchmark, showcasing a 15%+ performance improvement.
Ben Visness@bvisness.me · 2y ago

After working hard to get 64-bit WebAssembly released in browsers, I would now like to discourage most people from using it 😛 (My first post on the SpiderMonkey website btw, which is a fun milestone) spidermonkey.dev/blog/2025/01...

Is Memory64 actually worth using?

After many long years, the Memory64 proposal for WebAssembly has finally been released in both Firefox 134 and Chrome 133. In short, this proposal adds 64-bit pointers to WebAssembly.

spidermonkey.dev