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

Getting started with WABT

Let's first install WABT and then explore the various options provided by the WABT tool.

Installing WABT

In order to install WABT, first clone the repository from GitHub:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt

Note

We use the --recursive flag here as it ensures that after the clone is created, all submodules within the repository (such as test-suite) are initialized.

Go into the cloned repository, create a folder named build, and then go inside the build folder. This is where we will generate the binaries:

$ cd wabt
$ mkdir build
$ cd build

Note

You will also need to install CMake. Refer to https://cmake.org/download/ for more instructions.

To build the binary with CMake, we first need to generate the build system. We specify the source to the cmake command. CMake will then build trees and generate a build system for the specified source, using the CMakeLists.txt file.

Linux or macOS

In order...