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:
.free()
on a JS object, leaving the Rust memory allocated.Closure
type) may not be executed and cleaned up.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.