Portable Native Code for JavaScript Runtimes with WebAssembly, Rust and wasm-pack

Web development has greatly revolved compared to the original architecture and technological stack. Nowadays, it is not only possible to develop with JavaScript or its superset - TypeScript - but also to write native code that compiles to a platform-agnostic, portable format: WebAssembly (Wasm). Modern runtimes such as Node.JS or most web browsers support running Wasm, which bridges the gap between native and interpreted, but on the other hand allows a bi-directional reuse of code compiled to Wasm in virtually any runtime thanks to Wasm support either natively or via libraries in many runtimes and environments ranging from Python through C#, C++, Java, PHP to Node.js. This paper focuses on the new range of possibilities Wasm opens: re-use of code in multi-technology projects without the need to port common parts to the different languages used, in some cases - enhancing performance for computation-extensive parts thanks to compiler optimizations, and possibility to bring libraries from other technology stacks to any environment supporting Wasm (reducing technology lock-in).