Build efficient and reliable backend applications in WebAssembly.
Ice is a container for backend applications in WebAssembly.
WebAssembly, which is mainly used to build client-side Web applications, can also be used to build server-side applications. With a managed execution environment and the underlying JIT (wasm-core) based on LLVM, Ice is able to achieve a higher level of security (and additional safety for C/C++ applications), provide platform-independent high-level abstractions, and bring a few special features like dynamic inter-machine application migration and more accurate service monitoring.
Latest nightly Rust and LLVM 6 are required.
cargo build --release
First, create a root directory to place configurations & applications:
mkdir my_ice_root
cd my_ice_root
Then, create a config file config.yaml in the root directory, whose format is defined in config.rs/Config:
yaml
applications:
- name: hello_world
path: ./apps/hello_world
Here we've specified an application named hello_world located at ./apps/hello_world, and the application will be automatically initialized when ice_core is launched.
Now let's initialize the hello_world application:
mkdir apps
cd apps
cargo new hello_world
cd hello_world
Add a [lib] section and the runtime library ia to the newly-created Cargo.toml:
```toml [lib] name = "hello_world" crate-type = ["cdylib"]
[dependencies] ia = "0.1" ```
And create another config.yaml in the hello_world directory, which is the application-level metadata definition (defined in config.rs/AppMetadata:
yaml
package_name: com.example.hello_world
bin: target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/hello_world.wasm
Write some code to print "Hello, world!" in src/lib.rs:
```rust
extern crate ia;
app_init!({ println!("Hello, world!"); 0 }); ```
Build it:
cargo build --release --target wasm32-unknown-unknown
cd back to myiceroot and launch ice_core:
ice_core config.yaml
and you should see your first hello_world application running!
The WebAssembly VM has to do some necessary checks and translations to ensure things work correctly. Therefore, it is always a little slower than precompiled native binaries. However, the difference is quite small and normally doesn't become the performance bottleneck for real-world applications.
In addition, Ice Core is able to provide a few features that a native environment doesn't provide: