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 2. Elements of WebAssembly - Wat, Wasm, and the JavaScript API

Chapter 1, What is WebAssembly?, described the history of WebAssembly and provided a high-level overview of the technology as well as the potential use cases and limitations. WebAssembly was described as being composed of multiple elements, not just the binary instruction format specified in the official definition.

In this chapter, we will dig into the elements that correspond to the official specifications created by the WebAssembly Working Group. We will examine the Wat and the binary format in greater detail to gain a better understanding of how they relate to modules. We will review the JavaScript API and Web API to ensure you're able to utilize the WebAssembly effectively in the browser.

Our goal for this chapter is to understand the following:

  • How the text and binary formats are related
  • What Wat is and where it fits in to the development process
  • The binary format and module (Wasm) file
  • The components of the JavaScript...