hypercore-protocol in WASM through Rust

This is a first experiment to compile the Rust implementation of hypercore-protocol to WASM for use in browsers. At the moment, this is a minimal demo that only includes the wire protocol part (with all transport crypto) but not the persistence and verification parts (i.e. the hypercore crate).

• Update 2021-03-03: Cleaned the code and fixed README
• Update 2021-03-02: I wrote this some time back, now updated it roughly to the current dev branch of hypercore-protocol-rs. and pushed it to share and invite others to experiment with this

What this does (in Rust compiled to WASM):

• Fetch a key, encoded as hex string, from /key
• Open a Websocket to localhost:9000
• Open a hypercore-protocol stream on the websocket
• Open a channel for the key that was fetched before
• Load all data blocks, and display them on the page (as a string in a pre element)

A Node.js server has the simple demo backend:

• Create a hypercore feed in-memory
• Append the contents of this README file
• Open an HTTP server
• On /key send the hypercore's key as a hex string
• Serve the static files (index.html, index.js from this dir plus the WASM created through wasm-pack in /pkg)
• On other requests, open a websocket connection and pipe it to the replication stream of the hypercore

How to run

cargo build
wasm-pack build --dev --target web
cd server
yarn
node server.js
# open http://localhost:9000

If it works, this should display this README in the browser, loaded over hypercore-protocol in Rust in WASM :-)

Check the browser console for some logs. It currently needs quite a while until the content is displayed, I don't know yet why this is.