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 Parcel

Parcel is a blazing-fast, zero-configuration web application bundler. Parcel is the new kid in the web application bundler space. It is built from scratch to be fast and needs zero configuration. The main pain point of webpack is its configuration. Although it looks simpler to start with, it gradually becomes more complex and unmanageable when the application grows. But the configuration will give a complete overview of what is happening and how it is bundling. With zero configuration, Parcel will infer the bundle from the initial point (that is, index.html) and then build the entire graph from there.

While webpack has a plugin-based architecture, Parcel has a worker-based architecture. This enables Parcel to be faster than webpack as it uses multicore compilation and cache.

Parcel also has inbuilt configuration to support JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files. Just like webpack, it also has various plugins that we can use to configure the bundler...