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

WABT and Binaryen


WABT and Binaryen allow developers to work with source files and develop tooling for WebAssembly. If you're interested in working with WebAssembly at a lower level, these tools provide the means for accomplishing such a goal. In this section, we'll evaluate these tools in greater detail and review the purpose and capabilities of each one.

WABT – the WebAssembly binary toolkit

WABT's focus is on the manipulation of WebAssembly binary (.wasm) files and text (.wat) files, as well as conversion between the two formats. WABT provides tools to translate Wat to Wasm (wat2wasm) and vice versa (wasm2wat), as well as a tool to convert a Wasm file to a C source and header file (wasm2c). You can view the entire list of tools in the README file of the WABT GitHub repository at https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt.

One example use case of WABT is the WebAssembly Toolkit for VS Code extension we installed in Chapter 3Setting Up a Development Environment. The extension depends on WABT to...