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Cover image for Running Rust in WebAssembly in a Pool of Concurrent Web Workers in JavaScript
Alessandro Genova
Alessandro Genova

Posted on • Originally published at alesgenova.github.io

Running Rust in WebAssembly in a Pool of Concurrent Web Workers in JavaScript

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think whether they should.

I would like to share a little experiment I did for no other reason than to show I could.

In this proof of concept, the main application starts a pool of web workers that it later uses to offload a series of heavy tasks.

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The task in question is to to render a single frame of a simple 3D scene using ray-tracing (path-tracing). The computationally intensive rendering is performed by a rust library compiled to WebAssembly.

These are the tools I used:

  • GitHub logo alesgenova / post-me

    📩 Use web Workers and other Windows through a simple Promise API

  • GitHub logo alesgenova / ray-tracer

    A simple ray tracing engine

  • GitHub logo rustwasm / wasm-bindgen

    Facilitating high-level interactions between Wasm modules and JavaScript

  • Small in-house task queue to dispatch tasks to workers when available.
  • react for the skeleton of the app.

If you would like to run this madness, an instance of this application is deployed here.

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If you would like to see the details of the implementation, you can find the source code of the app on Github

Bonus

Using a similar approach, I also created an app that can detect the pitch of sounds being captured by the device's microphone.

Try it out

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Top comments (3)

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winstonpuckett profile image
Winston Puckett

This is really helpful. I'm trying to write my own game engine and having good examples of 3D graphics when I get there... In a few years lol... is awesome

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alesgenova profile image
Alessandro Genova

Glad you liked it!
Keep in mind that the ray tracing engine I implemented runs on the CPU, so it's way too slow for any practical application.
I just wrote it out of curiosity and to teach myself some rust while following "Ray tracing in a weekend" in C++

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winstonpuckett profile image
Winston Puckett

Ray tracing in general might be not what I'm looking for. I'm thinking even a basic "how to place 3D objects in webgl" would be useful for me :)