Learn Babel, Jspm and Rust

In this course, Chris takes a README-driven approach to build out a Rust CLI that supports content authoring for a digital garden.

Specifically, you'll work through the first command for the CLI, writing files. You start by initializing a new Cargo binary crate through creating the `write` command that allows you to create files (and their contents) to the folder that you set. 

Step by step you'll learn about:
- Handling user input
- Error handling
- Rust Move semantics
- Rust Copy semantics
- Integration testing

...and more!

Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

rust

Creating a Digital Garden CLI with Rust

Rust is a modern language that is close to the metal. It's got the performance of C, but with a more friendly syntax and community.

It's also memory safe, and ensures your applications are bug free by catching errors at compile time instead of runtime.

These features make Rust a great choice for developing code for embedded systems, web servers, and CLI apps. You can even compile Rust into WebAssembly in order to run it in-browser!

But as the saying goes, "before you learn to run, you must learn to walk".

In this course, you will write your first Rust application.

Starting from “Hello World” you’ll quickly move on to learning about Rust’s types, configuration files, and the `cargo` package manager along with classics like functions, loops, and handling user input.

More Rust-specific concepts like macros and pattern matching will also be introduced.

Check out these [**community notes for this course on Github**](https://github.com/eggheadio-projects/write-your-first-program-with-the-rust-language).

Next Steps: [Basic Types in Rust](https://egghead.io/playlists/data-types-in-rust-ab72)

Write Your First Program with the Rust Language

[Rustlings](https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings) is a set of exercises that serves as a great introduction to the Rust language. It covers many concepts from the [Rust book](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/) by asking you to work through sets of exercises.

This collection walks you through Rustlings in a way that explains what's going on in each exercise. We cover everything from basic types to generics and threading.

Learning Rust by Working Through the Rustlings Exercises

This collection contains videos that explore the basic types in Rust, including **Fixed size Integer**, **Pointer sized Integer**, **Boolean**, **Strings**, **Characters**, **Arrays**, **Tuples** and more.

If you're just starting out learning Rust and [wrote your first program](https://egghead.io/courses/write-your-first-program-with-the-rust-language), this collection is the right place to get more familiar with the language!

Basic Types in Rust

Many languages work on a compilation story to WebAssembly, but Rust is already ready for primetime. Why?


- Rust is a stable language and great replacement for C and C++. 
- Due to the reference and borrowing concept, Rust doesn’t need a Garbage Collector and can be used for a production-ready WebAssembly project. 
- The Rust/Wasm team has built some sophisticated tooling for straightforward interoperability between Rust and JavaScript.

This course gives you the tools to compile to WebAssembly with Rust. Over 11 lessons, we’ll set up a project and explore various paths of communication and interoperability between Rust and JavaScript.

Using WebAssembly with Rust

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

We can write our package using the latest JavaScript syntax with a compilation step. In this lesson we will install `babel-cli` and `babel-preset-latest` and wire up a `build` script to compile our code using the babel “latest” preset when source files change. This means those using our package can use it in any version of JavaScript even though we are using the latest syntax for our source code.

Set up compilation of source code using babel with npm scripts

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

jspm is a package manager for the SystemJS universal module loader, built on top of the dynamic ES6 module loader.

jspm

JSPM can handle installed packages, transpiling ES6, and bundling all from the command-line. This video gives a quick overview of install JSPM, installing packages with JSPM, writing a very simple app in ES6 that uses those packages, then bundling up for production.

An Introduction to JSPM (JavaScript Package Manager)

Babel is a compiler that lets us right future JavaScript not yet fully in browsers (ES6 / ES2015, ES7 / ES2016, etc) and transpile it back into code that can be used now. We'll walk through installing babel, writing some future JS syntax, transpiling it, and running it in a browser.

**This lesson is out of date and uses an older version of Babel.**

Writing next generation JavaScript with Babel 5 (out of date)

In order to setup a project we need to install the nightly build of Rust and add the WebAssembly target. For an improved workflow we also install the CLI tools wasm-pack and wasm-gc.

Setup Rust for WebAssembly

In this lesson we are going to setup a project from scratch by introducing the JavaScript snippet to load a WebAssembly module. We demonstrate two different ways and showcase the benefit of the streaming solution. Once the module is loaded we can invoke a function previously exported from our Rust code.

Load a WebAssembly Function Written in Rust and Invoke it from JavaScript

In some cases it’s useful to be able to invoke a JavaScript function inside Rust. This session showcases how this can be done, by passing along our JavaScript functions to the WebAssembly module instantiation.

Pass a JavaScript Function to WebAssembly and Invoke it from Rust

webpack is a tool to build JavaScript modules in your application. To start using webpack from its cli or api, follow the Installation instructions. webpack simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your application and bundling them in the right order. webpack can be configured to customise optimisations to your code, to split vendor/css/js code for production, run a development server that hot-reloads your code without page refresh and many such cool features.

webpack

Interoperability between JavaScript and Rust is limited to numerics and accessing memory directly. Since this can be exhausting and overwhelming to do manually the Rust/Wasm team has created the wasm-bindgen project to facilitate high-level interactions between Rust and JavaScript.

Set up wasm-bindgen for easy Rust/JavaScript Interoperability

Having some kind of debugging tool in our belt is extremely useful before writing a lot of code. In this lesson we build a println!()-style syntax using JavaScript’s console.log to be able to log out values in Rust.

Debug a WebAssembly Module Written in Rust using console.log

While JavaScript has a garbage-collected heap, WebAssembly has a linear memory space. Nevertheless using a JavaScript ArrayBuffer, we can read and write to WebAssembly’s memory space.

Access WebAssembly Memory Directly from JavaScript

The goal of this course is to explain how to setup a project using JavaScript and WebAssembly with Rust.

We start out with building our first WebAssembly module and loading it. Then we gradually build up until to a point where we use wasm-bindgen to invoke functions and pass data between JavaScript and Rust without a hassel.

Further we explore various tools like wasm-pack to build our Rust code with ease and use them in combination with Node or Webpack.

Course Overview: Using WebAssembly with Rust

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

node

WebAssembly is great for targeting performance bottlenecks in the browser. Now with node-loader, we can do the same on the server through Node.js

While Node offers also bindings to native extensions for C/C++ via node-gyp, there was no straight forward way to write Rust extensions. In addition did the node-gyp API change often and developers had to be careful to make their C/C++ code work with various operating systems.

Compiling Rust to WebAssembly solves both of these issues. The API is stable and once compiled to WebAssembly it will run on every operating system supported by Node.

Since Node doesn't support loading `.wasm` files a loader is needed. The loader flag though is only supported when using the `--experimental-modules` flag in Node 10 or higher.

Run WebAssembly in Node.js using the node-loader

`wasm-pack` is a tool that seeks to be a one-stop shop for building and working with Rust generated WebAssembly that you would like to interop with JavaScript. This includes ability to publish modules so that you can share your Rust generated WebAssembly code with others. 

In this lesson we create a npm package and export a Rust function that will log to the console in the browser. We publish the module to NPM and afterwards use a `rust-webpack-template` to install and use the newly published package.

Create and Publish a NPM Package Containing Rust Generated WebAssembly using wasm-pack

`js-sys` offers bindings to all the global APIs available in every JavaScript environment as defined by the ECMAScript standard.

In this lesson, we will install and use `js-sys` to invoke JavaScript's Date API to grab the current time. The date will need to be converted to a value Rust can use and display that date from Rust in the browser.

Use the js-sys Crate to Invoke Global APIs Available in Any JavaScript Environment

Previous to this lesson, we set up our own Rust/wasm project from scratch.

The Rust/wasm team ships a template for you to get started right away. In this lesson, you'll see how to initialize the template (assumes you have `wasm-pack` installed) and see how this template gives you additional custom Rust features in addition to the `WasmPackPlugin` that will build your library on every file change.

Create a New Rust/Webpack Project using the rust-webpack Template

In this lesson, we’ll install Babel and use it from the terminal to see how it can take JavaScript that uses modern language features and output JavaScript that will run in down-level browsers.