Practical WebAssembly: Explore the fundamentals of WebAssembly programming using Rust

by Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen

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

232 pages, Paperback

Published May 2, 2022

Reviews

[Andrea Santambrogio · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the intro, decent overview of formats and tooling. From Chapter 3, some explanations are missing, for instance why is asm.js needed in the browser and why is it not optimised by default. Descriptions of WAST instructions is sometimes vague or wrong (for instance tee_local) and I really can’t believe the author mistakes BYTES for BITS while describing the hexdumps. It’s embarrassing for any engineer to make such rookie mistakes!

[Ethan J · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm disappointed, it's too much of a how-to rather than the history of webassembly