Simon Willison’s Weblog

14th September 2024

Notes on running Go in the browser with WebAssembly (via) Neat, concise tutorial by Eli Bendersky on compiling Go applications that can then be loaded into a browser using WebAssembly and integrated with JavaScript. Go functions can be exported to JavaScript like this:

js.Global().Set("calcHarmonic", jsCalcHarmonic)

And Go code can even access the DOM using a pattern like this:

doc := js.Global().Get("document")
inputElement := doc.Call("getElementById", "timeInput")
input := inputElement.Get("value")

Bundling the WASM Go runtime involves a 2.5MB file load, but there’s also a TinyGo alternative which reduces that size to a fourth.