Introducing webassembly-loader: Yet another webpack-loader for importing wasm code 😂

Repository

https://github.com/DrSensor/webassembly-loader

About

Just as I mentioned when first releasing rs-jest, I need to create another wasm-loader alike because rs-jest and rollup-plugin-rust can export wasm into javascript module in various mode while wasm-loader and webpack webassembly/experimental don't have that feature.

This way rs-jest can be used in a project that either use Webpack or Rollup.

Current features

The feature are pretty much the same as rs-jest and rollup-plugin-rust export option. However, when used as a library, you can choose which module should be generated^[ref]. Currently there is only 2 choices: CommonJS module (cjs) and ECMAScript module (esm).

Technology Stack

📦 Main Dependencies

The library that I use in this project is pretty much the same as described in official Webpack documentation^[ref]. However, I have been in doubt^[code] between using @webpack-contrib/schema-utils or schema-utils.

✔️ Test Framework/Approach

The test framework I used for this project is Jest running on Nodejs v8 or higher. The reason the minimum Nodejs is not v6 because the WebAssembly support begins in Nodejs v8. For the approach, I implement 2 kinds of test: unit-tests and smoke-tests. The unit-tests use Jest which automatically confirms that the generated code can be run in Nodejs ≥8.x. Also, I choose to test the bundle results rather than test the source code which make https://codecov.io can't report the coverage (see #Others for the reason). For the smoke-tests itself, I choose a project that integrate Rust into Vue using rust-native-wasm-loader.

Test	Link	environment
unit	https://github.com/DrSensor/webassembly-loader/tree/master/test	nodejs
smoke	https://github.com/DrSensor/webassembly-loader/tree/master/examples	browser

Coverage results: PR#3

On the unit-tests, I split it into 3 test suites which represent the usages:

• lib.test.ts will test if this package used as a library which the bundler/transpiler must respect pkg.module
• loader.test.ts will test if this package used as a Webpack Loader
• negative.test.ts will test all possible errors either when used as a library or as a Webpack Loader

♻️ CI and Build Tools

As usual, I use CircleCI for the automation build/testing. Unlike binaryen-loader, I don't structure the project base on webpack-defaults but rather on typescript-library-starter which use Rollup rather than Webpack. In the CI workflow itself, the difference with binaryen-loader is I disable the testing jobs for node6-latest and node8-canary (also add the smoke-test). For node8-canary, I disable it because there is no webpack@next since Webpack 4 was graduated from it's beta version :yay:

_{CI workflow on regular commit}

_{CI workflow on tagging release}.

Ah yes, CI jobs draft and smoke-rust-vue require jobs node8-latest to be successfully run but seems CircleCI can't display it properly (the lines is overlap 😂)

💪 Others

As you can guess, I use Typescript for developing this webpack loader, either in the test scripts or in the source code. The interesting things when I use Typescript in this kind of setup is I need to split the configuration between bundling and testing because Jest doesn't support transpiling es6 import when importing CommonJS module (red: schema-utils and loader-utils). This is why I specify module code generation to CommonJS ^[code]. Thankfully, rollup-plugin-typescript2 has an option to override tsconfig.json configuration so it doesn't give me an extra headache 😂.

Future Plans

• Need to figure out how to test the source code instead of the bundle results.
• Add another export mode for map and async-map so that it can be used in Vue/Svelte projects seamlessly. Just like how we usually integrate Vuex in a Vue component, the syntax would be:

import { mapExports } from 'lib.rs'

export default {
 methods: {
     ...mapExports([
         '*cryptSHA3',
         'fourier_transform',
         'matrix_*'
     ])
 }
}

Something that I learn when creating this package

Webpack

• Seems like there is an effort to make Webpack loader mechanism as a separate module ^[repo]. I hope it can make testing and supporting es6 export much more easier.
• There is also an ongoing effort to make testing Webpack Loader/Plugin easier ^[repo]

Webassembly

• There is a proposal for ES Module Integration ^[repo]
• Rust v1.29.0 or later produce wasm file bigger than Rust v1.28.0. I found it when I try to compile simple add(a: i32, b: i32) operation targeting wasm32-unknown-unknown with LTO enabled and in release profile. I got ~57KB using rustc 1.29.2 and rustc 1.31.0-nightly while rustc 1.28.0 just produce 151 bytes. Someone from Rust discord server said that's because debuginfo is now always active and the only way to squash the size down is to run wasm-opt / wasm-gc and co. I'm sad.

How to contribute?

Just DM's me, make a Github issue or writes a comment below if someone interested. For guidelines, see Contributing section.

I don't plan to create parcel-plugin-rust since I never handle a project that use Parcel before. Feel free to contact me if anyone want to use this loader as a library. I'm willing to help out.

And...there is also a hacktoberfest task for this loader :p (I know I'm little bit late to join the hype).

GitHub Account

https://github.com/DrSensor

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