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

Minimizing the WebAssembly modules

wasm-bindgen is a complete suite that generates the binding JavaScript file (along with polyfills) for the WebAssembly module. In previous chapters, we saw how wasm-bindgen provides libraries and makes it easy to pass complex objects between JavaScript and WebAssembly. But in the WebAssembly world, it is important to optimize the generated binary for size and performance.

Let's see how we can further optimize the WebAssembly modules:

  1. Create a WebAssembly application with all the necessary toolchains:
    $ npm init rust-webpack wasm-rust
    🦀 Rust + 🕸 WebAssembly + Webpack = ❤

This previous command creates a new Rust and JavaScript-based application with webpack as the bundler.

  1. Go into the generated wasm-rust directory:
    cd wasm-rust

The Rust source files are present in the src directory and the JavaScript files are available in the js directory. We have webpack configured for running the application...