wasm | The Blog Pros

November 12, 2021

How WebAssembly Powers Databases: Building a UDF Engine With Wasm

This article is based on a project at TiDB Hackathon 2020.

User-defined functions (UDFs) are an important extension to the SQL language. When you want to do customized computations in a database, you can write the desired computation logic as a UDF and pass it to the database. But not all DBMSs accept UDFs. For those that don't, a UDF engine is the solution we need.

July 11, 2021

Rust on the Front-End [Video]

Up until now, JavaScript has been the only ubiquitous language available in browsers. It has made JavaScript much more popular than its design (and its associated flaws) would have allowed. Consequently:

The number of JavaScript developers has grown tremendously and steadily,
The ecosystem around front-end JavaScript has become more extensive and much more complex,
The pace of changes has increased so that developers complain about JavaScript fatigue,
Interestingly enough, JavaScript sneaked on the back-end via Node.js,
etc.

I don't want to start a holy war about the merits of JavaScript, but IMHO, it only survived this far because of its role in browsers. In particular, current architectures move the responsibility of executing the code from the server to the client. It puts a lot of strain on the latter. There are not many ways to improve performance: either buy more powerful (and expensive!) client machines or make the JavaScript engines better.

February 20, 2021

Acrobat on the Web Powered by WebAssembly

PDF documents are a major part of our digital lives and, in an era where we spend most of our time working inside a web browser, enhancing the PDF experience on the web is crucial for providing a seamless, multi-device experience. As the creators of PDF, this led Adobe to envision Acrobat Web; we embarked on our Acrobat Web journey with the introduction of the Document Cloud PDF Embed API in 2019.

The PDF Embed API offers Adobe’s pixel-perfect PDF viewing on the web with the promise of performance and ease of integration on all major browsers. It also offers UI customization and integration with Adobe Analytics. You can see the Embed API in action here.