Using WebAssembly for Extension Development - Part Two
In the previous blog post about using WebAssembly for Extension Development, we demonstrated how the component model can be used to integrate WebAssembly code into your Visual Studio Code extension. In this blog post, we focus on two additional independent use cases: (a) running the WebAssembly code in a worker to avoid blocking the extension host's main thread, and (b) creating a language server using a language that compiles to WebAssembly.
To run the examples in this blog post, you need the following tools: VS Code, Node.js, the Rust compiler toolchain, wasm-tools, and wit-bindgen.
The examples in the previous blog post ran the WebAssembly code in the VS Code extension host main thread. This is fine as long as the execution time is short. However, long-running operations should be executed in a worker to ensure that the extension host main thread remains available for other extensions.
The VS Code component model provides a meta model that makes this easier by enabling us to automatically generate the necessary glue code on both the worker and extension main side.
