wapm-cli VS wasm-bindgen

To actually compile this we can use a tool called WABT (WebAssembly Binary Toolkit). It's basically a mess that requires CMake and I couldn't get it to run on WSL and I wasn't going to install MinGW. Instead there's a nice tool called WAPM from Wasmer which works like npm for webassembly packages and since it's been compiled down to webassembly we can run it in any environment. In fact we don't even need to add configuration so long as wapm is installed. We can run wax wat2wasm -- wat/mat.wat -o wasm/mat.wasm. wax is like npx for npm. If you're wondering the command we give wax is defined by the wasmer/wabt package: https://wapm.io/wasmer/wabt. Also for some reason you can't prefix local paths with ./ so wax wat2wasm -- ./wat/mat.wat doesn't work which tool me a while to figure out. Anyway this provides a nice simple compile environment if you want to work on raw WAT files.

That's the main reason we should start using WebAssembly for distributing and using packages.

Shamless plug: Wasmer [1] and WAPM [2] could help a lot on this quest!

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

[2]: https://wapm.io/

There's WAPM

If it's buildable for the WebAssembly WASI target, consider also distributing it through WAPM.

I don't know if many people have heard of it, but there's actually a WebAssembly Package Manager. It's similar to crates.io, except you upload WebAssembly binaries written in any language instead of Rust source code!

You can see this paying off with wapm, which lets you download applications that would have normally required compilation for your environment and run them anywhere with a supported runtime, which is imo pretty neat.

One step closer to the day when I can put actix-web creations up on WAPM so "Just type wax my-cool-thing to try it out" can be one of the distribution options.

I've added limited support to run wapm.io directly from the Terminal. Examples of commands that work well are wapm cowsay {Text} and wapm uuid.

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.