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@ -6,20 +6,22 @@ wasm: wasm-life-1/game.wat
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unlisted: true
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---
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Lately in doing research on WebAssembly I've been lookig around for examples
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Lately in doing research on WebAssembly I've been looking around for examples
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of things implemented in it, and I've come across several blog posts based on
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the fantastic *Rust And WebAssembly* tutorial for
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[Conway's Game of Life](https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/book/game-of-life/introduction.html).
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And I mean no shade towards the folks who wrote those, but I feel it's mildly
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disingenuous to say that those are "Conway's Game of Life in WebAssembly" when
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the actual game code was written entirely in Rust. WebAssembly is in that case
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really no more than a compilation target, not actually the language used.
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the actual game code was written entirely in Rust. In those sorts of projects
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WebAssembly is really no more than a compilation target, not actually the
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language used!
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So of course I knew what I had to do . . .
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Welcome to Conway's Game of Life, *actually implemented* in WebAssembly:
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<noscript>[If you enable Javascript, you'll see a game board here]</noscript>
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<canvas
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id="game"
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width="800"
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@ -34,7 +36,7 @@ Welcome to Conway's Game of Life, *actually implemented* in WebAssembly:
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What you're looking at here is Conway's Game of Life where ***all of the game code***
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is written in pure, raw, not-a-compiler-in-sight WebAssembly. Its performance is
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pretty comparable to the Rust versions, and I'm glad to say the code for it isn't
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pretty comparable to the Rust versions I've found, and I'm glad to say the code for it isn't
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even that much of a mess!
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Let's dive into how it works together, shall we?
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@ -255,7 +257,7 @@ be a bit verbose:
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i32.add
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local.tee $row
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;; loop back if less than heeight
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;; loop back if less than height
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global.get $boardHeight
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i32.lt_s
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br_if $rows
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@ -457,3 +459,13 @@ the *entire* board each time. But on anything up to about a 400x300 grid
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this was staying at roughly 5ms per frame on my machine, which should be
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suitable for keeping about 60 frames per second - particularly if I can
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optimize the board update function a bit as well.
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## Final thoughts
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So there it is! A Conway's Game of Life implementation actually done in
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real WebAssembly. I hope you enjoyed this brief look into what goes into
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writing this sort of algorithm in the language, and more than anything I
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hope you appreciate your compilers for all the fantastic work they do for
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you.
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As promised the full source files used in this post are linked below.
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