React-WebAssembly

A simple React application that calls a Rust(WebAssembly) function

• WebAssembly is a new type of code that can be run in modern web browsers — it is a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance and provides languages such as C/C++, C# and Rust with a compilation target so that they can run on the web. It is also designed to run alongside JavaScript, allowing both to work together.

For this application, I used Rust and targetted WebAssembly as an output. There are 2 ways to use Rust in WebAssembly

1. Create an entire application using Yew (a Rust Framework)
2. Add WebAssembly inside an already existing application - *This is what is happening here

Steps

• Create a React App

npx create-react-app react-app

or if you have Vite

npm create vite and follow the steps

• Inside your React App;

  • Create Rust library with cargo. cargo new wasm-lib --lib

  • Implement a Rust function that you want to call from JavaScript.

    Do this inside lib.rs.

  • Wrap the function with wasm-bindgen to export it as Wasm.

    wasm-bindgen is Rust library that facilitate high-level interactions between Wasm and JavaScript. For example, you can call Rust(Wasm) from JavaScript, and vice versa.

  • Build as Wasm library with wasm-pack.

    Add a build command to bundle the Rust lib into a package

    "build:wasm": "cd wasm-lib && wasm-pack build --target web --out-dir pkg",

  • Call the Wasm function from the React app.

    As seen in the App.tsx file

Running this project

Prerequisites

1. NodeJS
2. Vite
3. Rust

• Clone the project

• Run;

  npm install or yarn install

• Run

  npm run build:wasm or yarn run build:wasm to create the Wasm Lib

• To view the application

  npm run dev or yarn dev

Viola !!