Tag: nodejs

The goal of this analysis is to try to understand what kind of gains a programmer should expect by using Rust and actix-web rather than Node and Express under typical use, without custom optimizations.

The point of having Rust-based WebAssembly in Node.js is to offload some compute-heavy parts from Node.js to Rust, which runs significantly faster for tasks that require algorithmic or memory optimization. The Rust compiler is smart enough to optimize its base functions, which makes it run faster. However, the combination of a single-threaded Node.js and Rust-based WebAssembly, which also runs without threading, won’t do much to save you time or resources.

The idea is to use a Node.js module worker_threads to spin up a new Rust WebAssembly computation without having a sync operation waiting in the main thread.