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

Installing the development tooling


You'll need to install some applications and tooling to start developing WebAssembly. We will use Visual Studio Code, a text editor, to write our C/C++, JavaScript, HTML, and Wat. We'll also use Node.js for serving up the files and Git to manage our code. We will use package managers to install these tools, which makes the installation process much simpler than downloading and installing them manually. In this section, we will cover the operating systems, as well as the package managers for each platform. We'll also review each of the applications, with a brief overview of their role in the development process.

Operating systems and hardware

To ensure that the installation and configuration process goes smoothly, it's important to be aware of the operating systems I will use for the examples in this book. If you encounter an issue, it may be due to an incompatibility between the platform you're using and the one I'm using. In most cases, you shouldn't have...