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 3. Setting Up a Development Environment

Now that you're familiar with the elements of WebAssembly, it's time to set up a suitable development environment. Developing with WebAssembly is tantamount to developing in C or C++. The difference lies in the build process and the output. In this chapter, we will cover the development tooling, and how to install and configure it on your system.

Our goal for this chapter is to understand the following:

  • How to install the required development tooling (Git, Node.js, and Visual Studio Code)
  • How to configure Visual Studio Code for use with C/C++ and WebAssembly using extensions
  • How to set up a local HTTP server to serve up the HTML, JavaScript, and .wasm files
  • Checking your browser for WebAssembly support
  • What helpful tools are available to simplify and improve the development process