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 4. Installing the Required Dependencies

Now that you have your development environment set up and you're ready to start writing C, C++, and JavaScript, it's time to add the final piece of the puzzle. In order to generate .wasm files from our C/C++ code, we need to install and configure the Emscripten SDK (EMSDK).

In this chapter, we'll discuss the development workflow and talk about how the EMSDK fits into the development process. Detailed instructions will be provided on how to install and configure the EMSDK on each platform, as well as any prerequisites. Once the installation and configuration process is complete, you'll test it out by writing and compiling some C code.

Our goal for this chapter is to understand the following:

  • The overall development workflow when working with WebAssembly
  • How the EMSDK relates to Emscripten and WebAssembly and why it's needed
  • How to install the prerequisites for the EMSDK
  • How to install and configure the EMSDK
  • How to test the EMSDK to ensure it's working...