Amazon Prime Video Rebuilds Living Room UI with Rust and WebAssembly

Amazon engineers detail their journey rebuilding the Prime Video living room device UI using Rust and WebAssembly. Facing challenges like massive performance variations across devices (set-top boxes, game consoles, etc.), inconsistent hardware capabilities, and difficult native code updates, they employed a hybrid architecture: a low-level UI engine in Rust and WebAssembly, with business logic in React and JavaScript communicating via a message bus. To further boost performance and responsiveness, they fully migrated the UI layer to Rust, creating a new Rust UI SDK. The new architecture dramatically reduced input latency and enabled previously impossible animation effects. While the WebAssembly ecosystem remains evolving, presenting challenges like panic handling, the overall results were positive, with increased developer productivity.