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

Analyzing the memory model in the WebAssembly module

Inside the JavaScript engine, WebAssembly and JavaScript run at different locations. Crossing the boundaries between JavaScript and WebAssembly will always have a cost attached to it. The browser vendors implemented cool hacks and workarounds to reduce this cost, but when your applications cross this boundary, this boundary crossing will often soon become a major performance bottleneck for your application. It is very important to design WebAssembly applications in a way that reduces boundary crossing. But once the application grows, it becomes difficult to manage this boundary crossing. To prevent boundary crossing, WebAssembly modules come with the memory module.

The memory section in the WebAssembly module is a vector of linear memories.

A linear memory model is a memory-addressing technique in which the memory is organized in a single contagious address space. It is also known as the Flat memory model.

The linear memory...