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 6. Interacting with JavaScript and Debugging

There's a great deal of exciting features and proposals in the works for WebAssembly. However, at the time of writing this book, the feature set is rather limited. As it stands, you can benefit greatly from using some of the features Emscripten provides. The process for interacting with C/C++ from JavaScript (and vice versa) will differ depending on whether you decide to use Emscripten.

In this chapter, we will cover how to utilize JavaScript functions with C/C++ code as well as how to interact with the compiled output of your C/C++ code from JavaScript. We'll also describe how Emscripten's glue code affects the ways a Wasm instance is utilized and how to debug compiled code in the browser.

Our goal for this chapter is to understand the following:

  • The differences between Emscripten's Module and the browser's WebAssembly object
  • How to call compiled C/C++ functions from your JavaScript code
  • How to call JavaScript functions from your C/C++ code...