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 5. Creating and Loading a WebAssembly Module

The flags we passed to theemcc command in Chapter 4Installing the Required Dependencies, produced a single .wasm file that could be loaded and instantiated in the browser using the native WebAssembly object. The C code was a very simple example intended to test the compiler without having to accommodate for included libraries or WebAssembly's limitations. We can overcome some of the limitations of WebAssembly in our C / C++ code with minimal performance loss by utilizing some of Emscripten's capabilities.

In this chapter, we'll cover the compilation and loading steps that correspond with the use of Emscripten's glue code. We'll also describe the process for compiling/outputting strictly .wasm files and loading them using the browser's WebAssembly object.

Our goal for this chapter is to understand the following:

  • The compilation process for C code that utilizes Emscripten's JavaScript "glue" code
  • How to load an Emscripten module in the browser...