Abstract
A web application executes inside a browser where built-in APIs enable lightweight and portable apps using a single codebase. The primary advantage of web apps is their broad reach. Their main drawback is restricting developers to languages native to the browser. Historically JavaScript has held a monopoly as the web programming language. While JavaScript is flexible and supports multiple programming paradigms. It is object-oriented at its core and uses weak typing with prototypes. The advantage of prototypes is powerful inheritance through chaining. The drawback is that every piece of primitive data has to reside inside an object wrapper. This orientation inhibits fast maths, as there is no way to opt-out of inheritance and object wrappers. Substantial changes to JavaScript have not been practicable due to backward compatibility. Browser vendors have therefore agreed to introduce WebAssembly (WASM) as a new language to offload computation. WebAssembly is a statically typed language emphasising fast maths. This thesis investigates its performance.