Cloud Native WasmDay - session videos
YOUTUBE.COM
Last month was the KubeCon / CloudNativeCon events, which were held in Amsterdam. This is a massive conference, with numerous tracks and ‘co-located’ events. One of these was Cloud Native Wasm Day, which focussed on WebAssembly applications beyond the browser.
If (like me) you were unable to attend, you’ll be very happy to hear that all of the sessions were recorded and are now available on YouTube 🎉
Don’t let Kelsey Hightower’s opening remark, “I know little-to-nothing about Wasm”, put you off 🤣 - his keynote was a fantastic scene-setter, and the 19 sessions that followed have some great content too.
Can Rust Beat Javascript in 2023?
BEARBLOG.DEV
I didn’t know it was a competition?! OK, I’ll bite …
This blog post looks at the recent performance improvements in various Rust/WebAssembly UI frameworks (Leptos, Dioxus), where they now beat various popular JavaScript libraries such as React and Vue on the JavaScript Framework Benchmark. An impressive result.
The rest of this post focusses on the ergonomics, demonstrating that Rust is more developer-friendly than ever before. Will Rust beat JavaScript? I don’t know, and to be honest, who cares? What is apparent from this blog post is that Rust is perfectly viable option for web-application development.
As an aside, if you look at the JS Framework Benchmark, and scroll all the way to the far right-hand side, you’ll find Blazor. It’s not quite as nippy as Rust 🤣
sane-wasm
GITHUB.COM
I’ve not heard of the SANE API before, it stands for “Scanner Access Now Easy” and provides an API for accessing a variety of image scanning hardware. It also has a delightfully retro website (although I’m not sure that is intentional!).
This project makes use of WebUSB, which as the ame suggest allows you to access USB devices from the browser, together with Emscripten, to port the SANE library to WebAssembly. This allows you to drive scanner hardware directly from your browser. Neat.
Hand-written MOD player
GITHUB.IO
This is a hand-written WebAssembly application, of just 2833, that plays MOD files. This is a file format that provides sequencing / samples to create music, having first become popular in the 1980s through the Amiga demoscene. And yes, I am that old, and remember it well. If you hunt around the internet you’ll find the “Dr. Strange Music” demo which I wrote as a teenager!
Thanks Ben Smith for the trip down memory lane. You can find the sourcecode on GitHub.
10 Days of Game Development with Uno Platform, WebAssembly, and C#
PLATFORM.UNO
Uno isn’t technically a game development platform, typically people use it for line-of-business application development. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t have a bit of fun with it and write some pretty cool games! This blog post follows Asadullah Refat’s 10 day journey, creating a fun game called Honk Buster, which you can play online.