Is WebAssembly still being developed?

Question

The main site detailing WebAssembly, https://webassembly.org/, does not appear to have been updated since version 1.0 shipped, even the feature roadmap. The docs on MDN don't seem much better, and the design repository hasn't been updated either. I see that the spec and reference implementation are being updated, though no new releases have been made for at least a year.

From this, it seems reasonable to conclude that WebAssembly is no longer being actively developed, and its MVP is simply being maintained to keep the websites that use it up and running - all of those cool post-MVP features posted on the roadmap (like threads, multiple memory banks, garbage collection, tables with stuff other than functions in them) will never see the light of day, or worse, WebAssembly will eventually be deprecated in favor of asm.js or a new standard. Is this a correct conclusion? Or is active WebAssembly development being tracked or planned out somewhere I didn't find?

Answer 1

Yes, WebAssembly is being very actively developed. However, after version 1.0 was released the specification has moved into a more evolutionary development process. In other words, don't expect a big fanfare and v2.0, v3.0 releases - instead, expect new features to be proposed, debated, developed and shipped at varying rates.

You can find out more about this phased approach here:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/master/process/phases.md

For a quick overview of the features that are actively being worked upon, take a look at the 'tracked' proposals:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22%F0%9F%9B%A4+tracking%22

Finally, for a much more accessible overview of where WebAssembly is going, see this great video on the 'post-MVP future' from Lin Clark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsYL4Z9sRec

Answer 2

It's fair to say that the webassembly.org website has been neglected for a while, since nobody seems to be owning its maintenance properly.

Nevertheless, there has been steady activity and development around the Wasm standard since the release, though for a number of reasons, it has been going a bit slower than some of us would wish for.

Most of the activity is on the various WebAssembly CG repositories. In particular, see the proposal overview for a complete list of all the upcoming extensions to the standard and their status. Quite a few of these have already been implemented in browsers like Chrome or Firefox.

None of these extensions has yet been merged into the master spec, since that document is still on the last meters of its path through formal W3C standardisation -- another process that took us longer than intended.