Minimal react webassembly case with Webpack, React

React Webpack with Rust WebAssembly

Fiddling around with an opinionated example for Webpack builds with WebAssembly.

Source code for fractal is based on https://dev.to/brightdevs/using-webassembly-with-react-1led, and the repository templated by https://github.com/Fallenstedt/wasm-react-webpack-template.

Notes

• WASM Build works pretty well with rust
• Rust is a solid option for getting webassembly integrated
• Golang was considered, but previous experiments weren’t as desired
• Makefile as an entrypoint is preferrable than using yarn ...
• Embedding the generated packages within the front (e.g. under pkg/) allows for local refs
• When does the build perform certain targets? E.g. resolution of paths vs copying of static files?
• Searching for options of individual target execution didn’t yield much (using wrong search terms?)
• Webpacks plugin model isn’t really the desired execution model, prefer graph-driven like buck/bazel
• Webpack plugin dumping the files just by directory path isn’t ideal, would prefer to ref (e.g. //pkg/fractal)
• Loading WebAssembly requires a bit of pre-amble, could probably be made into a <project>-commons for UIs responsible for loading it
• Usages of them are pretty nice, opportunities for generated API/Schemas/State Machines/State Models

I’m not sure on this one. I get the benefits that come with the webpack ecosystem, but had multiple issues with the way its goes about it in comparison to patterns like Bazel/Buck. I like this pattern more for combining various languages to create the final result, such as having a rust library for certain functions or components. Splitting it away from the frontend makes it so they can be designed in more of a “unit-test” way. Possible options might be to encode a state machine within one of these libraries, then have the web interface act on this, like a View => ViewModel => {Model} where the ViewModel performs queries into the state machine {Model}.