I am a big fan of the Rust language but so far haven’t done more than read a few books and write some simple hello world applications. I want to become proficient in Rust because it has first class support for WebAssembly, runs as fast as C++ but is much safer. I am a big believer in the future of WebAssembly and Rust seems like the best language for building WebAssembly. Rust does have a large learning curve, but those that make it over the hump absolutely love it.

I have been looking forward to really getting into Rust and now have a project in mind. The project is to create a DICOM RLE CODEC in Rust as part of my effort to update the CornerstoneJS codecs. RLE is currently implemented in CornerstoneJS in native JavaScript, but I would like to have WebAssembly versions of each codec to deliver maximum performance and be used by any language that supports WebAssembly. While I did do a quick C++ Implementation as part of another experiment which could be built in WebAssembly via EMSCRIPTEN, it is not production ready and I would rather spend my time learning productizing a Rust version rather than a C++ version.

I am going to be streaming my development of the Rust RLE Codec on my twitch.tv channel, feel free to join in and say hi on chat! Although the DICOM RLE algorithm is simple, I am expecting this to be painfully slow due to me being new to the Rust language.