If you’re looking for information about WebAssembly, this article is definitely for you:
➡️ https://thenewstack.io/will-javascript-become-the-most-popular-webassembly-language/
My take:
The article is excellent and explores the topic less through technical “how-to” examples (for that, I’d point you to a different article instead: https://www.yieldcode.blog/post/native-rust-wasm) and more through the question of whether WebAssembly is even needed (spoiler: it is), why JavaScript is the center of its universe, which working tools exist today, and the vision for the future of WASM as a whole. Inside, you’ll find plenty of links to WebAssembly-related projects, initiatives, and working libraries. Enjoy the read 📖
As a bonus, Google also has an excellent introductory video on WebAssembly: https://youtu.be/RcHER-3gFXI. It briefly covers the essentials: what wasm is, where it’s used, its portability, and its performance.
Creating WASM modules
Here are a few articles on creating wasm modules:
➡️ https://medium.com/geekculture/webassembly-for-node-js-13ef6bec0a0 A walkthrough of a simple module that computes Fibonacci numbers via recursion. It’s more illustrative than practical, but it’s great for building a general understanding of how wasm modules are structured and implemented.
➡️ https://www.yieldcode.blog/post/supercharge-nodejs-with-rust Another Fibonacci module, this time built with the Neon framework. The article is really more about Neon than about WebAssembly itself, but that doesn’t make it any less useful.
➡️ https://www.alxolr.com/articles/how-to-process-a-csv-file-five-times-faster-in-node-js-with-rust-and-napi-rs A more practical example you can build on, since it uses the napi.rs framework for creating wasm modules. The task is reading and processing CSV. Here, as in the previous example, wasm runs several times faster — which can be critical for this kind of workload.
P.S. Both examples use Rust. In my opinion, it’s the most successful replacement for C/C++ (or at least a worthy alternative). Its complexity is well balanced against its capabilities, and it’s a good fit for just about anything — so knowing it will never hurt, especially now that major corporations are adopting Rust everywhere.
So if you’re considering learning a new language, I’d highly recommend Rust. The Let’s get Rusty YouTube channel is a great place to start. The author retells the official book in a lively, engaging way, complete with code examples, and shares a lot of useful, up-to-date information about Rust.
Not a sponsored post — just a genuine recommendation 🙂