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

Advanced Emscripten features


We covered the Emscripten features we'll be using most frequently for communicating between JavaScript and C/C++ in the previous sections, but those aren't the only capabilities Emscripten provides. There are advanced features and additional APIs that you need to be aware of, especially if you plan on adding more complex functionality to your application. In this section, we'll briefly review some of these advanced features and provide details about where you can learn more.

 

Embind

Embind is an additional feature that Emscripten offers for connecting JavaScript and C++. Emscripten's site provides the following description:

"Embind is used to bind C++ functions and classes to JavaScript, so that the compiled code can be used in a natural way by 'normal' JavaScript. Embind also supports calling JavaScript classes from C++."

Embind is a powerful feature that allows for tight integration between JavaScript and C++. You can wrap some C++ code in an EMSCRIPTEN_BINDINGS...