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

Chapter 8: Bundling WebAssembly Using wasm-pack

JavaScript is omnipresent, but being everywhere is both an advantage and a disadvantage. There are many different ecosystems that have various standards and purposes. Building a unique solution for all ecosystems is not practical.

Despite all this, the JavaScript community is doing a wonderful job here. The effort from the community makes JavaScript one of the go-to languages. For a language as versatile as JavaScript, there will be some weird corners (which of course every language has). When you are writing JavaScript, these need extra care and attention.

JavaScript is dynamically typed. This makes it difficult (almost impossible) to avoid runtime exceptions. While TypeScript, Flow, and Elm try to provide a (typed) superset on JavaScript's dynamic types, they cannot completely fix the underlying problem.

For any language to grow, it has to evolve fast, which JavaScript does. Evolving fast without breaking the existing...