Support for Weak References
By default wasm-bindgen does not use the TC39 weak references proposal. This proposal just advanced to stage 4 at the time of this writing, but it will still stake some time for support to percolate into all the major browsers.
Without weak references your JS integration may be susceptible to memory leaks in Rust, for example:
- You could forget to call
.free()on a JS object, leaving the Rust memory allocated. - Rust closures converted to JS values (the
Closuretype) may not be executed and cleaned up. - Rust closures have
Closure::{into_js_value,forget}methods which explicitly do not free the underlying memory.
These issues are all solved with the weak references proposal in JS. The
--weak-refs flag to the wasm-bindgen CLI will enable usage of
FinalizationRegistry to ensure that all memory is cleaned up, regardless of
whether it's explicitly deallocated or not. Note that explicit deallocation
is always a possibility and supported, but if it's not called then memory will
still be automatically deallocated with the --weak-refs flag.