Passing Complex Data Structures

When building high-performance applications with WebAssembly (WASM), you often need to exchange more than just simple numbers between your WASM module and JavaScript.

• How do you pass a string?
• What about an array of numbers?
• Or even a custom object structure?

This lesson explores strategies for efficiently handling these complex data types.

The key to passing complex data lies in understanding WASM's linear memory. This is a contiguous block of memory (like a large array of bytes) that is shared between your WASM module and the JavaScript environment.

WASM functions can only return numbers. So, instead of passing the entire data, we pass a pointer (a memory address, which is just a number!) to where the data resides in this shared memory.