wasm-bindgen

A project for facilitating high-level interactions between wasm modules and JS.

This project is sort of half polyfill for features like the host bindings proposal and half features for empowering high-level interactions between JS and wasm-compiled code (currently mostly from Rust). More specifically this project allows JS/wasm to communicate with strings, JS objects, classes, etc, as opposed to purely integers and floats. Using wasm-bindgen for example you can define a JS class in Rust or take a string from JS or return one. The functionality is growing as well!

Currently this tool is Rust-focused but the underlying foundation is language-independent, and it's hoping that over time as this tool stabilizes that it can be used for languages like C/C++!

Notable features of this project includes:

• Exposing Rust structs to JS as classes
• Exposing Rust functions to JS
• Managing arguments between JS/Rust (strings, numbers, classes, objects, etc)
• Importing JS functions with richer types (strings, objects)
• Importing JS classes and calling methods
• Receiving arbitrary JS objects in Rust, passing them through to JS
• Generates Typescript for now instead of JS (although that may come later)
• Catching JS exceptions in imports

Planned features include:

• Field setters/getters in JS through Rust functions
• ... and more coming soon!

This project is still very "early days" but feedback is of course always welcome! If you're curious about the design plus even more information about what this crate can do, check out the design doc.

Basic usage

Let's implement the equivalent of "Hello, world!" for this crate.

Note: Currently this projects uses nightly Rust which you can acquire through rustup and configure with rustup default nightly

First up, let's add the wasm target and generate a Rust project:

$ rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
$ cargo new js-hello-world

Now let's add a dependency on this project inside Cargo.toml as well as configuring our build output:

[lib]
crate-type = ["cdylib"]

[dependencies]
wasm-bindgen = { git = 'https://github.com/alexcrichton/wasm-bindgen' }

Next up our actual code! We'll write this in src/lib.rs:

#![feature(proc_macro)]

extern crate wasm_bindgen;

use wasm_bindgen::prelude::*;

#[wasm_bindgen]
extern {
    fn alert(s: &str);
}

#[wasm_bindgen]
#[no_mangle]
pub extern fn greet(name: &str) {
    alert(&format!("Hello, {}!", name));
}

And that's it! If we were to write the greet function naively without the #[wasm_bindgen] attribute then JS wouldn't be able to communicate with the types like str, so slapping a #[wasm_bindgen] on the function and the import of alert ensures that the right shims are generated.

Next up let's build our project:

$ cargo build --release --target wasm32-unknown-unknown

Note that we're using --release here because unfortunately the current LLVM backend for wasm has a few bugs in non-optimized mode. Those bugs will hopefully get smoothed out over time!

After this you'll have a wasm file at target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/js_hello_world.wasm. If you'd like you can use wasm-gc to make this file a little smaller

Now that we've generated the wasm module it's time to run the bindgen tool itself! Let's install it:

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/alexcrichton/wasm-bindgen

This'll install a wasm-bindgen binary next to your cargo binary. This tool will postprocess the wasm file rustc generated, generating a new wasm file and a set of JS bindings as well. Let's invoke it!

$ wasm-bindgen target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/js_hello_world.wasm \
  --out-dir .

This is the main point where the magic happens. The js_hello_world.wasm file emitted by rustc contains descriptors of how to communicate via richer types than wasm currently supports. The wasm-bindgen tool will interpret this information, emitting a replacement module for the wasm file.

The previous js_hello_world.wasm file is interpreted as if it were an ES6 module. The js_hello_world.js file emitted by wasm-bindgen should have the intended interface of the wasm file, notably with rich types like strings, classes, etc.

The wasm-bindgen tool also emits a secondary file, js_hello_world_wasm.wasm. This is the original wasm file but postprocessed a bit. It's intended that the js_hello_world_wasm.wasm file, like before, acts like an ES6 module. The js_hello_world.wasm file, for example, uses import to import functionality from the wasm.

Note that you can also pass a --nodejs argument to wasm-bindgen for emitting Node-compatible JS as well as a --typescript argument to emit a *.d.ts file describing the exported contents.

At this point you'll typically plug these files into a larger build system. Both files emitted by wasm-bindgen act like normal ES6 modules (one just happens to be wasm). As of the time of this writing there's unfortunately not a lot of tools that natively do this (but they're coming!). In the meantime we can use the wasm2es6js utility (aka "hack") from the wasm-bindgen tool we previously installed along with the parcel-bundler packager. Note that these steps will differ depending on your build system.

Alright first create an index.js file:

import { greet } from "./js_hello_world";
import { booted } from "./js_hello_world_wasm";

booted.then(() => {
  greet("World!");
});

Then a corresponding index.html:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta content="text/html;charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>
  </head>
  <body>
    <script src='./index.js'></script>
  </body>
</html>

And run a local server with these files:

# Convert `*.wasm` to `*.js` where the JS internally instantiates the wasm
$ wasm2es6js js_hello_world_wasm.wasm -o js_hello_world_wasm.js --base64

# Install parcel and run it against the index files we use below.
$ npm install -g parcel-bundler
$ parcel index.html

If you open that in a browser you should see a Hello, world! dialog pop up!

What just happened?

Phew! That was a lot of words and a lot ended up happening along the way. There were two main pieces of magic happening: the #[wasm_bindgen] attribute and the wasm-bindgen CLI tool.

The #[wasm_bindgen] attribute

This attribute, exported from the wasm-bindgen crate, is the entrypoint to exposing Rust functions to JS. This is a procedural macro (hence requiring the nightly Rust toolchain) which will generate the appropriate shims in Rust to translate from your type signature to one that JS can interface with. Finally the attribute also serializes some information to the output artifact which wasm-bindgen-the-tool will discard after it parses.

There's a more thorough explanation below of the various bits and pieces of the attribute, but it suffices for now to say that you can attach it to free functions, structs, impl blocks for those structs and extern { ... } blocks. Some Rust features like generics, lifetime parameters, etc, aren't supported on functions tagged with #[wasm_bindgen] right now.

The wasm-bindgen CLI tool

The next half of what happened here was all in the wasm-bindgen tool. This tool opened up the wasm module that rustc generated and found an encoded description of what was passed to the #[wasm_bindgen] attribute. You can think of this as the #[wasm_bindgen] attribute created a special section of the output module which wasm-bindgen strips and processes.

This information gave wasm-bindgen all it needed to know to generate the JS file that we then imported. The JS file wraps instantiating the underlying wasm module (aka calling WebAssembly.instantiate) and then provides wrappers for classes/functions within.

What else can we do?

Much more! Here's a taste of various features you can use in this project:

// src/lib.rs
#![feature(proc_macro)]

extern crate wasm_bindgen;

use wasm_bindgen::prelude::*;

// Strings can both be passed in and received
#[wasm_bindgen]
#[no_mangle]
pub extern fn concat(a: &str, b: &str) -> String {
    let mut a = a.to_string();
    a.push_str(b);
    return a
}

// A struct will show up as a class on the JS side of things
#[wasm_bindgen]
pub struct Foo {
    contents: u32,
}

#[wasm_bindgen]
impl Foo {
    pub fn new() -> Foo {
        Foo { contents: 0 }
    }

    // Methods can be defined with `&mut self` or `&self`, and arguments you
    // can pass to a normal free function also all work in methods.
    pub fn add(&mut self, amt: u32) -> u32 {
        self.contents += amt;
        return self.contents
    }

    // You can also take a limited set of references to other types as well.
    pub fn add_other(&mut self, bar: &Bar) {
        self.contents += bar.contents;
    }

    // Ownership can work too!
    pub fn consume_other(&mut self, bar: Bar) {
        self.contents += bar.contents;
    }
}

#[wasm_bindgen]
pub struct Bar {
    contents: u32,
    opaque: JsValue, // defined in `wasm_bindgen`, imported via prelude
}

#[wasm_bindgen(module = "./index")] // what ES6 module to import from
extern {
    fn bar_on_reset(to: &str, opaque: &JsValue);

    // We can import classes and annotate functionality on those classes as well
    type Awesome;
    #[wasm_bindgen(constructor)]
    fn new() -> Awesome;
    #[wasm_bindgen(method)]
    fn get_internal(this: &Awesome) -> u32;
}

#[wasm_bindgen]
impl Bar {
    pub fn from_str(s: &str, opaque: JsValue) -> Bar {
        let contents = s.parse().unwrap_or_else(|| {
            Awesome::new().get_internal()
        });
        Bar { contents, opaque }
    }

    pub fn reset(&mut self, s: &str) {
        if let Ok(n) = s.parse() {
            bar_on_reset(s, &self.opaque);
            self.contents = n;
        }
    }
}

The generated JS bindings for this invocation of the macro look like this. You can view them in action like so:

and our corresponding index.js:

import { Foo, Bar, concat } from "./js_hello_world";
import { booted } from "./js_hello_world_wasm";

export function bar_on_reset(s, token) {
  console.log(token);
  console.log(`this instance of bar was reset to ${s}`);
}

function assertEq(a, b) {
  if (a !== b)
    throw new Error(`${a} != ${b}`);
  console.log(`found ${a} === ${b}`);
}

function main() {
  assertEq(concat('a', 'b'), 'ab');

  // Note the `new Foo()` syntax cannot be used, static function
  // constructors must be used instead. Additionally objects allocated
  // corresponding to Rust structs will need to be deallocated on the
  // Rust side of things with an explicit call to `free`.
  let foo = Foo.new();
  assertEq(foo.add(10), 10);
  foo.free();

  // Pass objects to one another
  let foo1 = Foo.new();
  let bar = Bar.from_str("22", { opaque: 'object' });
  foo1.add_other(bar);

  // We also don't have to `free` the `bar` variable as this function is
  // transferring ownership to `foo1`
  bar.reset('34');
  foo1.consume_other(bar);

  assertEq(foo1.add(2), 22 + 34 + 2);
  foo1.free();

  alert('all passed!')
}

export class Awesome {
  constructor() {
    this.internal = 32;
  }

  get_internal() {
    return this.internal;
  }
}

booted.then(main);

Feature reference

Here this section will attempt to be a reference for the various features implemented in this project. This is likely not exhaustive but the tests should also be a great place to look for examples.

The #[wasm_bindgen] attribute can be attached to functions, structs, impls, and foreign modules. Impls can only contain functions, and the attribute cannot be attached to functions in an impl block or functions in a foreign module. No lifetime parameters or type parameters are allowed on any of these types. Foreign modules must have the "C" abi (or none listed). Free functions with #[wasm_bindgen] must also have the "C" abi or none listed and also be annotated with the #[no_mangle] attribute.

All structs referenced through arguments to functions should be defined in the macro itself. Arguments allowed implement the WasmBoundary trait, and examples are:

• Integers (not u64/i64)
• Floats
• Borrowed strings (&str)
• Owned strings (String)
• Exported structs (Foo, annotated with #[wasm_bindgen])
• Imported types in a foreign module annotated with #[wasm_bindgen]
• Borrowed exported structs (&Foo or &mut Bar)
• The JsValue type and &JsValue (not mutable references)

All of the above can also be returned except borrowed references. Strings are implemented with shim functions to copy data in/out of the Rust heap. That is, a string passed to Rust from JS is copied to the Rust heap (using a generated shim to malloc some space) and then will be freed appropriately.

Owned values are implemented through boxes. When you return a Foo it's actually turned into Box<RefCell<Foo>> under the hood and returned to JS as a pointer. The pointer is to have a defined ABI, and the RefCell is to ensure safety with reentrancy and aliasing in JS. In general you shouldn't see RefCell panics with normal usage.

JS-values-in-Rust are implemented through indexes that index a table generated as part of the JS bindings. This table is managed via the ownership specified in Rust and through the bindings that we're returning. More information about this can be found in the design doc.

All of these constructs currently create relatively straightforward code on the JS side of things, mostly having a 1:1 match in Rust with JS.

License

This project is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this project by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.