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

Summary

In this chapter, we have seen how to optimize the WebAssembly binary using Rust, how to map memory between JavaScript and Rust, and finally, how to analyze a WebAssembly module using Twiggy.

The WebAssembly ecosystem is still in its early days and it promises better performance. The WebAssembly binary addresses a few gaps in the JavaScript ecosystem, such as size-efficient compact binaries, enabling streaming compilation, and properly typed binaries. These features make WebAssembly smaller and faster. Rust, on the other hand, provides first-in-class support for generating a WebAssembly module and wasm-bindgen is the best tool available that makes it easier to transfer complex objects in Rust and WebAssembly.

I hope that you now understand the basics of WebAssembly and how Rust makes it easier to generate WebAssembly modules. I can't wait to see what you will be shipping with Rust and WebAssembly.