DOES BASE64 ENCODING REDUCE SIZE CODE

Thus, the first four pixels of the image are used to store the size of the WebAssembly binary as an unsigned 32-bit little-endian integer, which can then be used by the decoder to truncate the image data to the correct length. Any remaining pixels in the last row of the image were set to zero, but this presented a problem, since zero-padding a WebAssembly binary is not allowed. Each pixel in the grayscale image corresponds to one byte in the WebAssembly binary, starting in the top-left corner of the image and wrapping line-by-line. For this, I decided to set the image width to the smallest power of two that allowed the image to have a landscape aspect ratio, although this decision was somewhat arbitrary. To encode the binary as a PNG image, the dimensions of the image must first be decided on. Thus, I decided to encode the WebAssembly binary as a grayscale PNG image, Base64-encode the PNG as a data URI, and include the resulting string in the JavaScript file. Although such decompression functionality isn’t exposed directly to JavaScript, PNG images can be decoded from JavaScript, and PNG images use Deflate compression. However, this is still excessive, since it shouldn’t be necessary to provide a Deflate decompression function as web browsers include such functionality. The simplest change would be to use a raw Deflate-compressed payload instead of one encapsulated with gzip, as the zlib.js library also provides a decompression function for this, which is only ~2.5 kB after gzip-compression, saving ~4 kB.

While I liked the idea of compressing the WebAssembly binary prior to Base64-encoding it, I thought there must be a way of decompressing it with a smaller decompression code. While this significantly reduced the size of the Base64-encoded WebAssembly binary, it required ~6.5 kB for the decompression code, after gzip compression. To mitigate this issue, the blog post author had the clever idea of gzip-compressing the binary prior to Base64-encoding it and using the zlib.js JavaScript library to decompress the binary client-side, after undoing the Base64-encoding. Unfortunately, this significantly inflates the total file size, since the Base64-encoded string does not compress nearly as well as the original binary. This is accomplished by Base64-encoding the WebAssembly binary as a string and including the resulting string in the JavaScript file.

DOES BASE64 ENCODING REDUCE SIZE CODE

The part that interested me the most was a section about efficiently embedding the WebAssembly binary into the JavaScript code such that the library could be distributed as a single file, instead of the usual method of providing the WebAssembly binary as a separate file. Recently, I came across a blog post about converting parts of a JavaScript library into WebAssembly.

Does base64 encoding reduce size