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

Upcoming features


There are several upcoming WebAssembly features in various phases of the standardization process. Some of them are more impactful than others, but all of them are valuable improvements. In this section, we'll describe the standardization process and review a subset of the features that represent a significant shift in WebAssembly's capabilities. Most of the content in this section was referenced from Colin Eberhardt's blog post titled The future of WebAssembly - A look at upcoming features and proposals. The post can be found at https://blog.scottlogic.com/2018/07/20/wasm-future.html.

The standardization process

The WebAssembly W3C Process documentation at https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/master/process/phases.md describes the six phases (from 0 to 5) of the standardization process. The following list provides brief descriptions of each of these phases:

  • Phase 0. Pre-Proposal: A WebAssembly Community Group (CG) member has an idea, and the CG votes on whether to...