WebAssembly Patterns

Ship near-native performance to the browser, serverless, and the edge with WebAssembly. Covers Rust, Go, and C++ toolchains (wasm-pack, TinyGo, Emscripten), JS interop, memory layout, and when WASM actually beats plain JavaScript.

This skill helps you compile and integrate WebAssembly modules across the stack. It walks through choosing a source language, configuring toolchains, marshalling data across the JS/WASM boundary, managing linear memory, and deploying WASM to browsers, edge runtimes, and serverless platforms — plus guidance on the workloads where WASM is worth the complexity.

When to use

Use when porting compute-heavy code to the browser or edge, building WASM modules in Rust/Go/C++, debugging JS ↔ WASM interop, optimizing module size and startup, or deciding whether WebAssembly is the right tool for a workload.

Examples

Rust to WASM in the browser

Compile a Rust crate and call it from JS

Compile this Rust image-processing function to WebAssembly with wasm-pack and wire it into my React app, passing a Uint8Array across the boundary efficiently

WASM on the edge

Run a portable module on an edge runtime

Build a TinyGo WASM module that validates JWTs and deploy it to run on an edge worker with fast cold starts

Is WASM worth it here?

Evaluate WASM vs plain JS

I have a hot path doing matrix math in JavaScript — analyze whether moving it to WebAssembly would actually help and show the benchmark approach