Book Image

Practical WebAssembly

By : Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen
Book Image

Practical WebAssembly

By: Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen

Overview of this book

Rust is an open source language tuned toward safety, concurrency, and performance. WebAssembly brings all the capabilities of the native world into the JavaScript world. Together, Rust and WebAssembly provide a way to create robust and performant web applications. They help make your web applications blazingly fast and have small binaries. Developers working with JavaScript will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to developing faster and maintainable code. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, examples, and self-assessment questions, you’ll begin by exploring WebAssembly, using the various tools provided by the ecosystem, and understanding how to use WebAssembly and JavaScript together to build a high-performing application. You’ll then learn binary code to work with a variety of tools that help you to convert native code into WebAssembly. The book will introduce you to the world of Rust and the ecosystem that makes it easy to build/ship WebAssembly-based applications. By the end of this WebAssembly Rust book, you’ll be able to create and ship your own WebAssembly applications using Rust and JavaScript, understand how to debug, and use the right tools to optimize and deliver high-performing applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to WebAssembly
5
Section 2: WebAssembly Tools
9
Section 3: Rust and WebAssembly

Running Hello World with Emscripten in Node.js

In this section, we will see how to convert C/C++ code into the WebAssembly binary via Emscripten and run it along with Node.js.

Note

If the terminal errors out with emcc command not found, your terminal environment might have been reset. To set up the environment, run the following command from inside the emsdk folder:

source ./emsdk_env.sh

Let's follow the tradition of Brian Kernighan, by writing "Hello, world" with a slight twist. Let's do a "Hello, Web":

  1. First, we create a hello_web.c file:
    $ touch hello_web.c
  2. Launch your favorite editor and add the following code:
     #include <stdio.h>
     
    int main() {
        printf("Hello, Web!\n");
        return 0;
    }

It is a simple C program with a main function. The main function is the entry point during the runtime. When this code is compiled and executed using Clang (clang sum.c &...