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

Parallel Wasm with Web Workers


The process of building a complex application that performs heavy computation or other resource-intensive work can benefit greatly from using threads. Threads allow you to perform operations in parallel by dividing functionality among tasks that run independently. At of writing this, support for threads in WebAssembly is in the Feature Proposal phase. In this phase, the specification hasn't been written and the feature isn't implemented. Fortunately, JavaScript provides threading capabilities in the form of Web Workers. In this section, we'll demonstrate how to use JavaScript's Web Workers API to interact with Wasm modules in separate threads.

Web Workers and WebAssembly

Web Workers allow you to utilize threads in the browser, which can improve the performance of your application by offloading some of the logic from the main (UI) thread. Worker threads are also capable of performing I/O using XMLHttpRequest. Worker threads communicate with the main thread by...