Book Image

Practical WebAssembly

By : Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen
Book Image

Practical WebAssembly

By: Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen

Overview of this book

Rust is an open source language tuned toward safety, concurrency, and performance. WebAssembly brings all the capabilities of the native world into the JavaScript world. Together, Rust and WebAssembly provide a way to create robust and performant web applications. They help make your web applications blazingly fast and have small binaries. Developers working with JavaScript will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to developing faster and maintainable code. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, examples, and self-assessment questions, you’ll begin by exploring WebAssembly, using the various tools provided by the ecosystem, and understanding how to use WebAssembly and JavaScript together to build a high-performing application. You’ll then learn binary code to work with a variety of tools that help you to convert native code into WebAssembly. The book will introduce you to the world of Rust and the ecosystem that makes it easy to build/ship WebAssembly-based applications. By the end of this WebAssembly Rust book, you’ll be able to create and ship your own WebAssembly applications using Rust and JavaScript, understand how to debug, and use the right tools to optimize and deliver high-performing applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to WebAssembly
5
Section 2: WebAssembly Tools
9
Section 3: Rust and WebAssembly

Bundling WebAssembly modules with webpack

webpack is a static module bundler for modern JavaScript applications. So, what does it do?

You can consider webpack as an informal compiler for the frontend. webpack takes in an entry point of an application, slowly runs through the modules, and builds a dependency graph. The dependency graph holds all the modules. These modules are necessary for the application to run.

Once the dependency graph is built, webpack outputs one or more bundles. Webpack is very flexible, helping us to bundle or package JavaScript as we need it and the options are provided in the webpack configuration. Based on the provided options, webpack creates the output.

Well, that sounds simple, right?

It was that simple a few years ago when the only library that we needed was jQuery.

But due to JavaScript's rapid evolution, there are a lot of different things happening now. The underlying runtime is not the same. There are three different browser engines...