It has similar goals to asm.js, most importantly to allow running computationally intensive programs in the browser, but instead of being a subset of JavaScript, it is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. The successor to asm.js is WebAssembly, which first appeared in 2017. An early demonstration of the viability and ease of use of the toolchain was the porting of Unreal Engine 3 to the web, which was developed as a collaboration of Mozilla and Epic Games in 4 days. It can compile C/C++ code bases by converting Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) bitcode to asm.js. The de-facto compiler toolchain for asm.js is Emscripten.

It allows the browsers to perform ahead-of-time optimizations on the code and to run it with superior performance to unoptimized JavaScript. Asm.js was introduced as a strict subset of JavaScript to be used as a low-level target language for compilers. The possibility of plugin-free native application execution inside browsers came with the 2014 release of the asm.js specification. After decades of development and innovation, modern browsers can play high-quality video streams, complex animations, games, and simulations and perform other computationally intensive tasks natively without using any third-party plugins. Initially, it was a medium to exchange simple documents with links and basic formatting. The web was created to facilitate information-sharing between universities and institutes.

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