Cloudflare Announces Experimental Support for Native Rust in Workers

Cloudflare has announced the first public experimental preview of a feature to better support native Rust code and even Tokio-based applications running natively on Workers. This new feature includes first-class support for the Emscripten wasm32-unknown-emscripten Rust compiler target on the wasm-bindgen open source toolchain and Cloudflare’s Rust Workers.

wasm-bindgen is the open source toolchain powering Rust-based WebAssembly applications on Cloudflare’s V8-based Workers Runtime. Enabling the Emscripten target for wasm-bindgen has been a long-term effort, initiated by Google over a year ago and further supported by Cloudflare engineers maintaining wasm-bindgen.

While still in pre-release, this new feature enables significant improvements in library compatibility for Rust Workers. In testing, Cloudflare engineers were able to run a Rust-native Minecraft server (Pumpkin) inside a Durable Object with TCP ingress, using real TCP sockets via Tokio.

The wasm-bindgen and Emscripten toolchains now have seamless interoperability under the new -sWASM_BINDGEN configuration. This allows C++ Emscripten code to be built against static wasm-bindgen Rust code, and Rust applications using wasm-bindgen to be built for the Emscripten target.

Early prototypes by Cloudflare engineers demonstrated clear success for supporting the Emscripten target on Cloudflare Workers, with many libraries working out of the box, including low-level systems libraries.

Source: cloudflare