No releases or commits since Jan 2025. Is rustwasm shutting down?

[akira-kurogane]

I've just used wasm-bindgen for the first time and made a working POC for file analysis with it. It's definitely nicer code than my emscriptem one.

But now I've just realized commits stopped back in January. Is this tool being mothballed?

[g1eng]

IMO, the answer is no (or not yet).

In present, many WASM guys are shifting weight of contributions to WASM on workloads, such as embedded WASM or WASM on cloud. So wasm-bindgen, which has been focused on WASM/JS interaction, and was designed without latest WASI specifications in early days, is placed on a bit low priority target of the community. (But this is not a saying for the rustwasm community (ourselves), but for the WASM community itself). If you want to maintain a tool with the build target wasm32-unknown-unknown, the wasm-bindgen is a possible solution to do it.

You can use wit-bindgen and WASI Preview 2 target for a new project. They are preffered in production use cases because WASI P2 can achieve app sandboxing with declarative permission granting via WIT.

But if your code is focused on DOM manipluation, you maybe have to use wasm-pack with wasm-bindgen for ease of development. (You can write a working code (such as an example) for browsers, but it requires additional works to manipulate DOM structures).

[akira-kurogane]

Thanks for the background community info Nomura-san. That's very helpful to me.

As it happens the modules I am making at the moment are for web workers, no DOM involved. So it sounds like I'm in the target population of developers who eventually should/will/must port from the wasm-bindgen style to wt-bindgen.

As I'm running these programs of mine in the browser it seems I should use jco as well. Is that right?

[g1eng]

Because this is rustwasm community, I think that your question is out of scope here.

There are many efforts with wasm-bindgen (ouside the rustwasm community) at present, and also I really rely on it in several projects (but not for production).
I expect that someone posts more reliable information about this thread ;-)

Thanks: @CryZe

FYI: https://github.com/alexcrichton/blog.rust-lang.org/blob/sunset-rustwasm/content/inside-rust/sunsetting-the-rustwasm-github-org.md

[akira-kurogane]

Thanks @g1eng

I think I will keep on relying wasm-bindgen for a while too. The wrapping *.js produced from wasm-pack --target web is more concise than other methods, and it supports the File web API. (The WebSysFile interface in wasm-bindgen-file-reader has also become a dependency for my project, but any alternative that has a seek() method for a File object would do.)

Hopefully it'll be obvious as to how to port to wit-bindgen before not too long.

[akira-kurogane]

For other readers of this Q&A, the TLDR seems to be:

• This wasm-bindgen repo is apparently going to move to https://github.com/wasm-bindgen by itself and live on, though just for maintenance, while the rest of this github org ("rustwasm") will be archived.
• Official notice came out here: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2025/07/21/sunsetting-the-rustwasm-github-org/