Evaluation of Rust and WebAssembly when building a Progressive Web Application : An analysis of performance and memory usage

Abstract: One problem that has been plaguing software development is the multitude of platforms that are available to users. Consequentially, a company needs to provide its service on multiple devices, running different operating systems, in order to reach as many end-users as possible. This leads to increased development complexity and costs. To solve this issue, multiple cross-platform solutions have been proposed throughout the years. One such solution is Progressive Web Application, a set of techniques that aim to create web applications with features that have traditionally only been available to native applications. In recent years WebAssembly, a compilation target that allows languages other than JavaScript to run on the browser, has been introduced. With its compact binary format and compiled nature, its goal is to bring speed and performance enhancement to web applications. This thesis analyzes WebAssembly in the context of building a Progressive Web Application, particularly the impacts it has on the performance and memory usage. A comparison is made with the JavaScript library ReactJS. The results indicate that a Progressive Web Application built with WebAssembly achieves similar performance results as one built using ReactJS when it comes to computers, but performs worse on mobile platforms. The results also indicate that using a programming language such as Rust, although still introducing memory overhead, minimizes the bundle size and runtime memory consumption of the application.