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

Online tooling


The installation and configuration process for compiling WebAssembly modules locally is, admittedly, a little cumbersome. Fortunately, there are several online tools available that allow you to develop and interact with WebAssembly in the browser. In this section, we'll review those tools and discuss the functionality each one provides.

WasmFiddle

In the Connecting the dots with WasmFiddle section in Chapter 2Elements of WebAssembly- Wat, Wasm, and the JavaScript API, we used WasmFiddle to compile a simple C function to Wasm and interact with it using JavaScript. WasmFiddle provides a C/C++ editor, JavaScript editor, Wat/x86 viewer, and JavaScript output panel. You can also interact with the <canvas> if desired. WasmFiddle uses LLVM to generate the Wasm modules, which is why the imports and exports aren't prefixed with a _. You can interact with WasmFiddle at https://wasdk.github.io/WasmFiddle.

WebAssembly Explorer

WebAssembly Explorer, located at https://mbebenita.github...