Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020

In the post Moore’s Law era, we need to squeeze more performance from existing hardware. Native code provides the best performance. However, the prevalence of native code on the server-side presents challenges to application safety and manageability. The advent of Rust and WebAssembly offers new ways for developers to write high performance yet safe Node.js applications. The Rust programming language is Stackoverflow’s most beloved programming language for the past 4 years. WebAssembly, on the other hand, provides a fast and lightweight virtual machine for running and managing Rust programs. Through open source bridges between Node.js and WebAssembly / Rust, we can now create JavaScript and Rust hybrid applications for Node.js, and shift computing loads to Rust functions. In this talk, I will go over the basics of Rust and WebAssembly, as well as their integration into Node.js. You will learn when and how to design a hybrid web application, how to code the high performance functions in Rust, and how to tie everything together in a Node.js JavaScript application. At the end of this talk, you will have all the open source tools and resources you need to get started on your own.