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

Installing the prerequisites


Before installing and configuring the EMSDK, we'll need to install some prerequisites. You installed two of the prerequisites in Chapter 3, Setting Up a Development Environment: Node.js and Git. Each platform has slightly different installation processes and tooling requirements. In this section, we cover the installation process for the prerequisite tooling for each platform.

Common prerequisites

It's possible that you already have all of the prerequisites installed. Here are the three that you'll need regardless of the platform:

  • Git
  • Node.js
  • Python 2.7

Note the Python version; this is important because installing the wrong version could cause the installation process to fail. If you followed along in Chapter 2, Elements of WebAssembly - Wat, Wasm, and the JavaScript API, and installed Node.js and Git, all that's left is to install Python 2.7 and any additional prerequisites specified for your platform. The Python installation process for each platform will be specified...