Hello,
Thanks to the sponsoring by Tixeo, the FPC & Lazarus team has developed a pretty unique feature for the FPC WebAssembly support.
Webassembly is a bytecode format and embedding specification that allows you to load and run compiled code into the browser in a restricted environment. It is supported by all major browsers.
You can also run webassembly bytecode in command-line tools such as wasmtime or even in an FPC program, using the wasmtime library.
By itself, WebAssembly has no access to its environment. It can only use what the environment provides: file access, DOM acces etc. If the environment defines it, WebAssembly can use it. The webassembly specification only defines a mechanism to import/export routines from/to the environment in which it runs.
The browser has a rich environment, which it does not (yet) expose to the WebAssembly world. Which is a pity, because this limits the usefulness of WebAssembly in the browser considerably.
FPC has now developed a protocol which allows you to use all Browser APIs by the JOB (Javascript Object Bridge) mechanism, in particular the DOM functionality.
This allows you to build a UI (using HTML) for webassembly programs running in the browser: one can imagine running Lazarus in the browser...
More info about this unique feature can be found in the Wiki:
https://wiki.freepascal.org/WebAssembly/DOM
To my knowledge, the only other programming language to offer this kind of general support for browser API access from webassembly is Rust.
Enjoy,
Michael.