Practical WebAssembly

Understand the basic building blocks of WebAssembly and learn, install, and use various tools from the Rust and WebAssembly ecosystem

Key Features

• Understand the Rust programming language and WebAssembly concepts for web development
• Build web, mobile, and embedded apps using WebAssembly
• Enhance the scalability and resilience of your web apps

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Explore WebAssembly and the different tools available in the WebAssembly ecosystem
• Understand the raw WebAssembly binary and the WebAssembly text format
• Use the Web and JavaScript API with wasm-bindgen
• Optimize Rust and WebAssembly for high performance
• Run and debug WebAssembly and Rust code
• Explore various tools available in the RustWASM ecosystem

Who this book is for

This book is for JavaScript developers who want to deliver better performance and ship type-safe code. Rust developers or backend engineers looking to build full-stack applications without worrying too much about JavaScript programming will also find the book useful.

Table of Contents

1. Understanding LLVM
2. Understanding Emscripten
3. Exploring WebAssembly Modules
4. Understanding WebAssembly Binary Toolkit
5. Understanding Sections in WebAssembly Module
6. Installing and Using Binaryen
7. Integrating Rust with WebAssembly
8. Bundling WebAssembly Using wasm-pack
9. Crossing the Boundary between Rust and WebAssembly
10. Optimizing Rust and WebAssembly

Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen is an Engineering Manager building web payments at Uber. He is passionate about the Web and Cloud technologies. He has over 12 years of experience in building distributed, cloud-native, and enterprise systems. He occasionally rambles on his website and speaks at various conferences. He is an active open source contributor and enjoys building communities. He loves to learn and explore new programming languages.