How to Load & Run Local WASM Modules Without A Server Using Client-Side JavaScript

No plugins. No change to browser settings. How I applied it to my own use case.

Data processing and data storage are the bread and butter of data practitioners. As a data analyst working in the healthcare sector, I tend to prefer portable storage mediums such as SQLite database to Microsoft Excel or textual file formats e.g. Comma-Separated Values (CSV) when handling large tabular datasets (over ~150 million data records).

Illustration by Author | Loading WebAssembly (WASM) modules in browser without CORS policy restriction

Use-Case: Running SQLite In-Browser (sql.js)

A key advantage of implementing SQLite in-browser via the JavaScript plugin sql.js is the lack of installation and configuration requirements.

As such, this had prompted me to develop a standalone SQLite tool which I had implemented previously using sql.js compiled to Assembly JavaScript (ASM) which runs entirely on client-side JavaScript —

Read & Export SQLite Data in a JavaScript-enabled Browser Locally

Following the stable release of the WebAssembly (WASM) version of sql.js, I decided to follow up on this pet project by upgrading the plugin version from 0.x to 1.x ⇒ Assembly JavaScript (ASM) to WebAssembly (WASM).

Main benefits that WASM provide over ASM include greater native decoding speed (~20 times faster) and greater scalability for adding new features required to reach native levels of performance — Source: WASM official site

Note: At present the latest release is v1.8.0 (used in this article). Link to latest plugin version can be found here.

Develop SQLite Browser Tool With sql.js (WASM)

List of pre-requisite resources