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

Compiling with LLVM


In Chapter 1, What is WebAssembly?, we discussed the relationship between Emscripten's EMSDK and LLVM. Emscripten uses LLVM and Clang to compile C/C++ down to LLVM bitcode. The Emscripten compiler (emcc) compiles that bitcode to asm.js, which is passed to Binaryen to generate a Wasm file. If you're interested in using LLVM, you can compile C/C++ to Wasm without installing the EMSDK. In this section, we will review the process for enabling Wasm compilation using LLVM. After compiling some example C++ code to a Wasm file, we'll try it out in the browser.

The installation process

If you want to compile WebAssembly modules using LLVM, several tools need to be installed and configured. Getting these tools working together correctly can be an arduous and time-consuming process. Fortunately, someone went through the trouble of making this process much simpler. Daniel Wirtz created an npm package named webassembly (https://www.npmjs.com/package/webassembly) that can perform the...