RustWASM Notes

Notes on a presentation on RustWASM to the San Diego Rust Meetup, September 13th, 2018

Files in this repo

• README.md - this file
• rustwasm_setup.md - Detailed setup instructions for the RustWASM "Game of Life" tutorial
• rustwasm_workflow.md - Terse setup instructions, and workflow for the RustWASM in general, as well as the "Game of Life" tutorial

Possible Group Projects

Beginner Rust/JavaScript knowledge

• When the page loads, show the grid, but don't automatically start calculating generations
• Output universe calculation stats to JavaScript console.log
  • Total calcuation time
  • Number of cells that changed state

Intermediate/advanced Rust/JavaScript knowledge

• Calculate sha256 sum in Rust from a string passed in from JavaScript
• Initialize the universe with a single space ship.
• Generate a random grid of cells (50% chance of alive or dead), instead of generating the same grid every time programatically
  • The grid generation is done in lib.rs (Universe impl)
  • Bonus: allow the size of the universe to be changed prior to populating the random universe
• Allow for setting a range argument, to control how many ticks are run for each animation frame
• Insert a glider when the user Ctrl + Clicks on the grid
• Insert a pulsar when the user Shift + Clicks on the grid
• Detect when the grid is stable between generations, then pause the simulation at that point

Further optimizations that could be done to the tutorial

• Only pass the generation delta (cells that changed) back to the JavaScript
• Use bits to indicate alive/dead cells, instead of bytes
• Double buffering of cells in the Universe, so that you don't have to call self.cells.clone() every time you compute a new generation
• WebGL renderer instead of <canvas>
• Shrinking the size of the WASM binary

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