Thoughts on GEOS in WebAssembly
Kyle Barron muses different approaches for bringing high-performance geometry libraries written in C/C++ and Rust to the to the Web, using WebAssembly.
It’s my belief that for any project beyond a certain complexity, there should only be three core implementations:
- One in C/C++ because C/C++ is today’s de-facto performance-critical language, and it can bind to almost any other language.
- One in Rust because removing memory errors brings so much potential and Rust’s ergonomics bring impressive development velocity to low-level code. I believe it’s tomorrow’s performance-critical language.
- One in Java because the Java Virtual Machine makes it hard to interface with external C libraries (and it’s yesterday’s performance-critical language?).
The best code is the code that is never written, or so that say. Turf has served my modest needs well in the past, but something as fundamental as geometry operations doesn’t need to be rewritten if we have battle-tested libraries in other languages that we can bind with WebAssembly yielding similar, often better, performance. The JavaScript world has a weird habit of reinventing the wheel, solving the same problems with slightly different approaches. We end up with lots and lots of software that basically does the same thing—having fewer, but more stable options, would be a good thing.