Book Image

Learn WebAssembly

By : Mike Rourke
Book Image

Learn WebAssembly

By: Mike Rourke

Overview of this book

WebAssembly is a brand-new technology that represents a paradigm shift in web development. This book teaches programmers to leverage this technology to write high-performance applications that run in the browser. This book introduces you to powerful WebAssembly concepts to help you write lean and powerful web applications with native performance. You start with the evolution of web programming, the state of things today, and what can be done with the advent and release of WebAssembly. We take a look at the journey from JavaScript to asm.js to WebAssembly. We then move on to analyze the anatomy of a WebAssembly module and the relationship between binary and text formats, along with the corresponding JavaScript API. Further on, you'll implement all the techniques you've learned to build a high-performance application using C and WebAssembly, and then port an existing game written in C++ to WebAssembly using Emscripten. By the end of this book, you will be well-equipped to create high-performance applications and games for the web using WebAssembly.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Advanced Tools and Upcoming Features

WebAssembly's ecosystem is constantly growing and evolving. Developers have seen the potential for WebAssembly. They build tools to improve the development experience or output Wasm modules from their language of choice (albeit with some limitations).

In this chapter, we'll evaluate the underlying technologies that make WebAssembly tick. We'll also review tools you can use in the browser and cover an advanced use case that utilizes Web Workers. Finally, we'll quickly review upcoming features and proposals that are on the roadmap for WebAssembly.

Our goal for this chapter is to understand the following:

  • How WABT and Binaryen fit into the build process and what they can be used for
  • How to compile a WebAssembly module using LLVM (rather than Emscripten)
  • Online tools such as WasmFiddle and other useful tooling online
  • How to utilize Web Workers to run WebAssembly in parallel
  • Upcoming features (proposed and in progress) that will be integrated into WebAssembly...