wasm-bindgen-spawn

A Web Worker based multithreading library for Rust and WebAssembly.

This uses the WebAssembly threads proposal and shared memory to communicate between workers (once they are started), instead of postMessage. The threads proposal is currently in phase 4 and available in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Node.js

At the current stage, this is the closest thing to std::thread::spawn that "Just Works" for wasm32-unknown-unknown target. You can:

• Spawn a thread with a Rust closure
• Join a thread
• Send data between threads using channels
• Synchronize threads using std::sync primitives

Nightly Rust toolchain is required for unstable features. This library will remain on version 0.0.x until all features required are in stable Rust, standardized in WASM, and baseline widely available across browsers.

Examples

The examples directory on GitHub contains a full example using Vite.

See ThreadCreator for the main API.

Background/Design

I wrote a blog on how and why this library is designed this way, and what the limitations are. You can read it here.

Requirements

Cross-Origin Isolation

You can read more about this in the web dev article. Long story short:

• This is required for SharedArrayBuffer
• This is to mitigate Spectre-like attacks

To get started, the server that serves the main document must send these headers:

Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp
Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin

You can check if the document is in a cross-origin isolated context by running this in the console:

self.crossOriginIsolated

Read the full article for more details on the implications of Cross-Origin Isolation.

Rust Nightly and target-feature

1. Create a rust-toolchain file (no extensions) and put nightly in it, to use the nightly toolchain

   echo "nightly" > rust-toolchain
   

2. Add the following to .cargo/config.toml

   [target.wasm32-unknown-unknown]
   rustflags = ["-C", "target-feature=+atomics,+bulk-memory,+mutable-globals"]
   
   [unstable]
   build-std = ["panic_abort", "std"]
   

wasm-pack Target

Currently, this library only supports the no-modules target:

wasm-pack build -t no-modules

WASM in Web Worker

Since the main thread in web cannot block, you must use blocking operations in a web worker, this include:

1. Calling join on a JoinHandle
2. Calling recv on a Receiver in the std::sync library or oneshot library.

The example shows how to put the WASM module in the worker. You can then use some kind of RPC with postMessage to communicate between the main thread and the worker. This is probably something you have to do anyway to avoid the heavy, multithreaded computation freezing the UI.