Rust + WebAssembly News

[fitzgen]

Leave comments here with

• new blog posts
• announcements of new tools/libraries
• new releases from libraries/tools
• anything notable in the rust+wasm world
• suggested rust+wasm quote of the $TIME_PERIOD
• suggested rust+wasm crate of the $TIME_PERIOD

I'll go through the comments on this issue periodically and turn them into "This Week in Rust+WASM" style posts.

[fitzgen]

wee_alloc 0.4.4 released with support for stable rust on w32-u-u: https://github.com/rustwasm/wee_alloc/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#044

[Hywan]

Wasmer 0.3.0 has been released, https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/releases/tag/0.3.0. It adds WASI support, improved emscripten support, improved the C/C++ API for the runtime.

[fitzgen]

koute/stdweb#318 (comment)

[koute]

stdweb 0.6.14 was just released with initial wasm-bindgen compatibility!

This means that stdweb can now be used in wasm-bindgen projects, and projects using stdweb can now be built using wasm-bindgen tooling. No deeper interoperability (e.g. being able to pass wasm-bindgen types into js! snippets) between stdweb and wasm-bindgen is implemented yet, although hopefully we'll get there in the near future!

[Hywan]

wasmer, a Python extension to run WebAssembly, https://github.com/wasmerio/python-ext-wasm.

It's written in Rust, and is based on the Wasmer runtime. By default, the Cranelift backend is used, which is also written in Rust.

Run pip install wasmer and you are ready to use WebAssembly inside Python!

[axelf4]

dumle: A virtual DOM library using zero-sized types, https://github.com/axelf4/dumle

Makes constructing virtual trees have very little overhead.

[fitzgen]

https://maxbittker.com/making-sandspiel

[Hywan]

https://slides.com/lrlna/document-analysis-with-rust-wasm#/

MongoDB uses Rust+Wasm in Compass.

[fitzgen]

add Wasm support to runtime

[Hywan]

A Ruby extension to run WebAssembly, https://github.com/wasmerio/ruby-ext-wasm/. It's written entirely in Rust. It uses the Wasmer runtime, with Cranelift as the default backend, which is also pure Rust. I don't know if it fits here though.

[limira]

An experimental signal-based framework: https://gitlab.com/limira-rs/mika

[Pauan]

Dominator 0.5.0 has been published. Thanks to all the improvements to wasm-bindgen, I was able to successfully port dominator so it now fully works on wasm-bindgen!

The API is almost identical, and so it's quite easy to migrate dominator apps to the new version.

I also tried running some benchmarks, and here's the result (click to zoom in):

Most of the names are self-explanatory, but:

• wasm-bindgen-v0.2.47-keyed is a benchmark of wasm-bindgen without a framework (pure web-sys).

• stdweb-v0.4.17-keyed is a benchmark of pure stdweb without a framework.

• dominator-v0.5.0-keyed is the new wasm-bindgen version of dominator.

• dominator-stdweb-v0.4.4-keyed is the old stdweb version of dominator.

As you can see from the table, dominator is very competitive with other DOM frameworks, it's about the same speed as React.

You can find the dominator benchmark code here (it's just written in the standard idiomatic dominator style, no tricks).

I already knew that dominator was very fast (after all it's designed to be zero-cost), but it's good to see some cold hard numbers proving it.

It's also interesting to look at things like startup time and memory usage:

[torch2424]

Launched Wasm By Example 😄

A website with hands-on introduction / tutorials on getting started with Wasm who "learn by doing". With multiple language (programming and spoken) support! Currently has examples in Rust and AssemblyScript. Hopefully Emscripten soon, and feel free to contribute more examples! 😄

Website: https://wasmbyexample.dev/
Repo: https://github.com/torch2424/wasm-by-example
Tweet: https://twitter.com/torch2424/status/1143571589142740992