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

Binary format and the module file (Wasm)


The Binary Format section of the Core Specification provides the same level of detail with regard to language concepts as the Text format section. In this section, we will briefly cover some high-level details about the binary format and discuss the various sections that make up a Wasm module.

Definition and module overview

The binary format is defined as a dense linear encoding of the abstract syntax. Without getting too technical, that essentially means it's an efficient form of binary that allows for fast decoding, small file size, and reduced memory usage. The file representation of the binary format is a .wasm file, which will be the compilation output from Emscripten that we'll use for our examples.

The ValuesTypes, and Instructions subsections of the Core Specification for the binary format correlate directly to the Text Format section. Each of these concepts is covered in the context of encoding. For example, according to the specification...