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

Memory

Transferring data between JavaScript and WebAssembly is an expensive operation. In order to reduce the transfer of data between JavaScript and WebAssembly modules, WebAssembly uses sharedArrayBuffer. With sharedArrayBuffer both the JavaScript and WebAssembly modules can access the same memory and use it to share the data from one to the other.

The memory section of a WebAssembly module is a vector of linear memories. The linear memory model is a memory addressing technique in which the memory is organized in a single contiguous address space. It is also known as a flat memory model. The linear memory model makes it easier to understand, program, and represent the memory. But the linear memory model comes with a huge disadvantage of high execution time for rearranging elements in the memory and the wastage of memory space. Here, the memory represents a vector of raw bytes of uninterpreted data. They use resizable array buffers to hold the raw bytes of memory. We use sharedArrayBuffers...