Crystal Web Dev

Examples

Crystal WebAssembly App

Building a WebAssembly App

Crystal WebAssembly app compiles to WASM for browser use.

Introduction to Crystal and WebAssembly

Crystal is a statically-typed, object-oriented programming language that aims to combine the elegance of Ruby with the performance of C. WebAssembly (WASM) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine, designed to be a portable target for the compilation of high-level languages like Crystal. This makes it possible to run Crystal applications in web browsers, offering a performance boost compared to JavaScript.

Setting Up the Environment

To compile Crystal code to WebAssembly, you'll need to set up your environment with the necessary tools. This includes installing Crystal, the wasm-ld linker, and any additional libraries required for your project.

  • Install Crystal from the official Crystal website.
  • Ensure you have wasm-ld installed. This is often included with LLVM toolchains.

Writing a Simple Crystal Program

Let's start by writing a simple "Hello, WebAssembly!" program in Crystal. This example will output a greeting message to the console when run in a WebAssembly environment.

Compiling Crystal to WebAssembly

With your Crystal program ready, the next step is to compile it to WebAssembly. This involves using Crystal's compiler along with wasm-ld to generate a WASM file.

Here is the command to compile your Crystal code to WebAssembly:

Running the WebAssembly Module

Once you have your hello_world.wasm file, you can run it in a browser or any WASM-compatible environment. To execute it in a browser, you'll need to write some JavaScript to load and run the module.

Conclusion

Building a Crystal WebAssembly application involves several steps: setting up your environment, writing Crystal code, compiling it to WebAssembly, and running it in a browser. With WebAssembly, you can benefit from near-native performance in web applications, making it a powerful tool for developers. We hope this guide has helped you understand the process.

Examples