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

Summary


In this chapter, we reviewed advanced tools and an alternate compilation method for WebAssembly. We learned about WABT and Binaryen's role in the WebAssembly development process and the functionality they provide. We compiled a Wasm module with LLVM through the use of the WebAssembly npm package and interacted with the result in the browser. We reviewed some of the WebAssembly tooling available online and created a simple application that uses Web Workers to store Wasm modules in separate threads. Finally, we discussed the upcoming features of WebAssembly and the standardization process. Now that you've gained a greater understanding of WebAssembly, go out there and build something!