Mozilla and Spidermonkey
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Mozilla ☛ Slate’s ICYMI hosts on their online obsessions and wildest 2025 predictions [Ed: Mozilla is not interested in covering Firefox and the Web anymore]
Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and how they would design their own corner of the web.
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Spidermonkey Development Blog: 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.
If you are like most readers, you may be wondering: “Why wasn’t WebAssembly 64-bit to begin with?” Yes, it’s the year 2025 and WebAssembly has only just added 64-bit pointers. Why did it take so long, when 64-bit devices are the majority and 8GB of RAM is considered the bare minimum?
It’s easy to think that 64-bit WebAssembly would run better on 64-bit hardware, but unfortunately that’s simply not the case. WebAssembly apps tend to run slower in 64-bit mode than they do in 32-bit mode. This performance penalty depends on the workload, but it can range from just 10% to over 100%—a 2x slowdown just from changing your pointer size.
This is not simply due to a lack of optimization. Instead, the performance of Memory64 is restricted by hardware, operating systems, and the design of WebAssembly itself.