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

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

vim: filetype=markdown tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2