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

Emscripten and the EMSDK


We'll use Emscripten to compile our C/C++ code down to .wasm files. Up to this point, Emscripten has only briefly been mentioned in a general context. Since we'll use this tool and the corresponding Emscripten SDK (EMSDK) in the build process, it's important to understand what each technology is and the part it plays in the development workflow. In this section, we'll describe Emscripten's purpose and discuss its relationship to the EMSDK.

Emscripten overview

So what is Emscripten? Wikipedia provides the following definition:

"Emscripten is a source-to-source compiler that runs as a back end to the LLVM compiler and produces a subset of JavaScript known as asm.js. It can also produce WebAssembly."

We discussed source-to-source compilers (or transpilers) in the first chapter and used TypeScript as an example. Transpilers convert source code in one programming language to equivalent source code in another programming language. To elaborate on Emscripten running as a backend...