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 9: Crossing the Boundary between Rust and WebAssembly

So far, we have only seen examples of sharing simple numbers between JavaScript and WebAssembly. In the last section, we saw how wasm-bindgen helps to pass a string from Rust to JavaScript with ease. In this chapter, we will explore how wasm-bindgen makes it easier to convert more complex data types between JavaScript and WebAssembly via Rust. We will cover the following sections in this chapter:

  • Sharing classes from Rust with JavaScript
  • Sharing classes from JavaScript with Rust
  • Calling the JavaScript API via WebAssembly
  • Calling closures via WebAssembly
  • Importing the JavaScript function into Rust
  • Calling a web API via WebAssembly