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 8. Porting a Game with Emscripten

As demonstrated in Chapter 7Creating an Application from Scratch, WebAssembly is still relatively limited in its current form. Emscripten provides powerful APIs for extending WebAssembly's capabilities to add functionality to your application. Compiling to a WebAssembly module and JavaScript glue code (instead of an executable) can, in some cases, only require minor changes to the existing C or C++ source.

In this chapter, we're going to take a code base written in C++ that gets compiled to a traditional executable, and update the code so that it can be compiled to Wasm/JavaScript. We'll also add some additional features for tighter integration with the browser.

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

  • Update a C++ code base to compile to a Wasm module/JavaScript glue code (instead of a native executable)
  • Use Emscripten's APIs to add browser integration to a C++ application
  • Build a multi-file C++ project with the proper emcc...