The Backend Strikes Back

17:20-17:50, Lecture Room 1

Chris Nixon

Vaguely star wars themed, Sequel to “A Node Hype”. Live demo with some background, using rust, cargo, npmjs.com and web pack

Outline:

  • Quick intro to WebAssembly
  • Even quicker intro to rust
  • Example of creating a rust package (crate)
  • Publishing said crate to npmjs as wasm module
  • Create a barebones html page in a clean environment (with no rust toolchain)
  • Install rust crate/webassembly module from npm
  • Embed the webassembly module in said html page
  • Show it running, hopefully…

Summary:

  • Come to the dark side we have performance and powerful types
  • Examples of some other projects using webassembly for cool things
  • Potential warnings/drawbacks, no more view source, etc.

If I have time:

  • Brief sermon about formal reasoning being very powerful
  • Implications in other areas (webassembly on the server? unikernels?)
  • Some of my own Prognostication

Potential gags include:

  • Some sort of language based you killed my father/I am your father joke.
  • Disappointing prequels (flash, java)
  • BIG CORPORATE (still a bit disappointing, but better) sequels (asmjs, PNACL)
  • “I am the Senate/It’s treason then” (reduced democratisation of the web)

Audience Outcomes:

  • Awareness that WebAssembly exists
  • Awareness of Rust
  • Demo that webassembly is already practical, now.
  • Pun exhaustion
  • Where we are on the “Birth and Death of Javascript” timeline