WASM: Running GO in browsers

A 7-minute lightning talk at GopherConEu-2020

Web Assembly AKA WASM is a new way of running high-level languages into the browsers. Cases where you need to do complex computations like gaming, 3d rendering, AI stuff, etc in any language you want(which has support for WASM), it is something you definitely need to try out.

Web assembly is a new concept, it's not a language which you would require to code in, it's a binary format which gets ported into the browser directly.

It gives a great performance, portability, no more deployment dependency, offers a variety of languages to code in best suitable to the nature of problem.

Transcript

1. WASM: Running GO in browsers Ekta Garg | @_ektagarg Software Development Engineer, Grofers
2. Why do we really need to run GO code into browsers directly?
3. What is WASM? • Webassembly is a new type of code that can run on browsers. • Provides native like performance • Can be compiled from many low level languages like c, c++ , Go , Rust.
4. WASM is a binary instruction format …. Smaller files Faster Execution
5. … Designed as a portable target for compilation of high level languages ... Can use languages already known like GO, C, C++ Security/ sandboxed
6. … Enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications ... Shared code base Less deployment
7. GO’s journey to browser
8. Building GO to WASM main.go main.wasm GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm go build -o main.wasm main.go
9. GopherJS • Compiler from Go to JavaScript for running Go code in a browser. • Supports most of the standard libraries. Gopherjs build main.go main.js
11. Loading WASM... // compiled module object // instantiated instance API for fetching network resources
12. Calling GO from JavaScript syscall/js - Experimental package - Was part of 1.11 - Should be used when working with browser APIs - Support Callbacks - Copies data
13. Glue code- syscall/JS can only exit when we want it to!!
14. A callable function
15. Interacting with DOM
16. Conclusion ➢ It brings better performance to the web (especially for load times, and math-heavy stuff like image manipulation, video manipulation, games etc). ➢ When optimizing performance in existing JS apps, bottlenecks could be rewritten in a language that is better suited for the problem. ➢ More devs will be able to write code for web, less dependency on JS.
17. Thank you! @gopherconeu 2020