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

Debugging in the browser


Effectively debugging JavaScript code in the browser has not always been easy. However, development tooling has markedly improved in the browser and in editors/IDEs with built-in debugging capabilities. Unfortunately, adding WebAssembly to a web application adds an additional level of complexity to the debugging process. In this section, we will review some techniques for debugging JavaScript that utilizes Wasm as well as some of the additional capabilities Emscripten offers.

High-level overview

Debugging Emscripten's Module is relatively straightforward. Emscripten's error messages are well formed and descriptive, so you'll usually discover what's causing the issue right away. You can view these messages in your browser's development tools console.

If you specified a .html output when running the emcc command, some debugging code will already be built in (Module.print and Module.printErr). Within the HTML file, the loading code sets the window.onerror event to call...