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

Importing the JavaScript function into Rust

In certain places, JavaScript is faster than WebAssembly because there is no overhead of boundary crossing and instantiating a separate runtime environment. JavaScript runs more naturally in its own environment.

The JavaScript ecosystem is huge. There are millions of libraries created and battle tested (not all of them, of course) with JavaScript. This makes JavaScript easy (easy here is subjective).

WebAssembly addresses the most important problem that we have in the frontend world, that of "consistent" performance. But it is not a complete replacement for JavaScript. WebAssembly helps JavaScript to deliver better and more consistent performance.

JavaScript will be a default choice in most places. It is important to provide an ecosystem that allows seamless integration between the two. We have already seen how to import a class from JavaScript into Rust. Similarly, we can import anything from JavaScript into Rust using...