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 7. Creating an Application from Scratch

Now it's time to apply your knowledge! Since one of WebAssembly's primary design goals is to execute within and integrate well with the existing web platform, it makes sense to build a web application to test it out. Even though WebAssembly's current feature set is rather limited, we can utilize the technology at a basic level. In this chapter, we will build a single-page application from scratch that utilizes Wasm modules within the context of the Core Specification.

By the end of this chapter, you'll know how to:

  • Write functions that perform simple computations with C
  • Build a basic JavaScript application with Vue
  • Integrate Wasm into your JavaScript application
  • Identify the capabilities and limitations of WebAssembly in its current form
  • Run and test a JavaScript application using browser-sync