Discussion on: How to only Rust for web front_end

[Robert Katzki]

Thanks for the write-up! Started to learn Rust and am really curios on WASM.

Would love to know the difference in file size (gzipped and not) from JS to WASM and do you have some performance values?

[arn-the-long-beard]

Hello ! Thank you for your comments :)

Regarding the size, we have a big difference there.

The seeded version of the game is much bigger in Wasm.

With cargo make build_release

wc -c pkg/package_bg.wasm -> 368597 pkg/package_bg.wasm

gzip -9 < pkg/package_bg.wasm | wc -c -> 142825

I did not succeed to do the same command on my original Js+Wasm project, but on a clone of the available source with same options in Cargo.toml ( so there not the exercises like Random Universe and others)

wasm-pack build --release

wc -c pkg/wasm_game_of_life_bg.wasm -> 40271 pkg/wasm_game_of_life_bg.wasm
My original was around 47K from what I remember.

gzip -9 < pkg/wasm_game_of_life_bg.wasm | wc -c
-> 17498

Can be interesting to compare the total loaded in the web browser between the 2 projects.

Regarding the performance, a nice way to compare could be to increase a lot the size of the grid, but for now I do not have any metrics. I am gonna investigate to have an idea :)

[Robert Katzki]

Thanks! A comparison to the same in just JS would be interesting to see whether it’s worth the effort to use WASM.

[arn-the-long-beard]

When I push a lot the size of the grid, I get better performance on wasm+js than Seed, but that is mainly because I did not optimize the Seed code.

But the code for me is still much easier to work with, update & maintain in pure Rust than js :)