No Free Lunch: Limits of Wasm as a Bridge from Rust to JS

WebAssembly makes Rust-to-JavaScript integration look easy — until you hit the walls. I showed what wasm-bindgen actually does under the hood, where the abstraction leaks, and which trade-offs developers should expect when shipping Rust code to the browser or Node.js.

This was the first talk in a series on WebAssembly’s real-world limits. The follow-ups at EuroRust 2023 and other conferences tackled the specific challenges I surfaced here: error handling across the Wasm boundary, async without tokio, and I/O without WASI.