browser_wasi_shim VS wasm-bindgen

There are many options, but what worked best for me is compiling with cargo-wasi and loading the resulting Wasm file with browser_wasi_shim. Using wasm32-wasi instead of wasm32-unknown-unknown requires a bit more work (the communication with JS has to be set up manually), but gives the flexibility of having just a Wasm file that can be dropped in and loaded dynamically. (There's wit-bindgen for generating wrapping code according to an interface definition but I didn't have much success with it.)

The webassembly-language-runtimes is focused on providing WASI-based language interpreters, what would require a WASI polyfill at the browser level (https://wasi.dev/polyfill/) and (https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim).

Pyodide is certainly another option, but is emscripten based, not based in webassembly-language-runtimes or WASI.

Indeed, some people are doing this:

- WASI once had an official polyfill https://wasi.dev/polyfill/, now apparently succeeded by https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim

- wasmer-js provides a JS polyfill for WASI https://docs.wasmer.io/integrations/js/wasi

- Cloudflare has a WIP polyfill https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi

I'm generally leery of non-temporary polyfills, so I'm not sure that any of these feel like a long-term viable option for me.

Browser client library uses browser_wasi_shim to communicate with the module.

Another strange issue could be seen in the strict class heritage organized definition of the DOM, which can not be handled very well by rust because of a still unsolved bindgen issue (#210).

For a much simpler but less flexible approach there's wasm-pack for creating JS packages from Rust, and wasm-bindgen for easy interop. Both have very good documentation.

We encountered quite a few hurdles on our journey. For one, we had to build our own yew-webtransport and yew-websocket integration from scratch by adding WebTransport definitions to wasm-bindgen (pull request link). We also had to add WebTransport support to the h3 crate (pull request link). co-created by @ten3roberts

Go with your WebAssembly module idea. Since it sounds like your chess engine does not draw a UI, it shouldn't be too difficult. wasm-bindgen will be your best friend.

I've never tried it, but apparently some bindings exist, e.g. https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen

So you can either try manipulating the DOM w/ some bindings or draw to canvas.

Google also brings up this GitHub issue.

If you want to learn more on wasm-pack, there is a wasm-pack book as well as some fairly detailed wasm-bindgen docs. There are a few resources for learning Rust itself in the December newsletter. Finally, please get in touch if you would like to see more content on Deno and Fresh. I hope you found the content useful and am keen to hear about possible improvements.

Love the article.

In my mind I see the problem of dynamic linking in rust to have a bunch of overlap with the "I want this rust library to be exposed in my higher level GC'd language with minimal safety/handwritten bindings" problem.

My hunch is that the lack of expressiveness of the C ABI is holding back both. the thing I'd love to see some sort of "higher level than the C ABI" come out. And something like `wasm-bindgen`[0] to exist for more languages.

Here's a link to the rust "interopable_api" proposal! I don't understand all the implications, but it seems to be in the right direction https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/105586

[0]https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/wasm-bindgen/

Rust has https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen and https://crates.io/crates/sledgehammer, the latter of which batches together JS calls to reduce the FFI cost. https://dioxuslabs.com/ uses these to great effect.

This seems like it could be super useful for integrating with wasm-bindgen and TypeScript. Last I checked, the types generated by wasm-bindgen left a lot to be desired (no disrespect intended, wasm-bindgen is an awesome project). A few years ago, I contributed the skip_typescript attribute to wasm_bindgen that allowed you to override the type generation by hand-writing your own types (using a custom typescript section), but I wonder if this could simply generate higher quality types without the manual intervention.