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

Calling a web API via WebAssembly

The evolution of the web has been phenomenal, with its growth being attributed to its open standards. Today, the web provides hundreds of APIs, which makes it easy for web developers to develop for audio, video, canvases, SVGs, USBs, batteries, and so on.

The web is universal and omnipresent. It is continuously experimented with and changed to make it desirable and easy for developers and companies to use, respectively. The web-sys crate provides access to almost all the APIs that are available on the web at the moment.

The web-sys crate provides raw bindings to all the Web's APIs: everything from DOM manipulation to WebGL to Web Audio to timers to fetch and more! – web-sys crates.io (https://crates.io/crates/web-sys)

The WebIDL interface definitions are converted into wasm-bindgen's internal abstract syntax trees (ASTs). Then, these ASTs are used to create zero-overhead Rust and JavaScript glue code.

With the help of this...