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

Summary


In this chapter, we covered the installation and configuration process for the development tooling we will use to start working with WebAssembly. We discussed how to install Git, Node.js, and VS Code quickly and easily using a package manager for your operating systems (for example, Homebrew for macOS). The steps to configure VS Code were presented as well as the required and optional extensions you can add to enhance the development experience. We discussed how to install a local web server for testing and how to validate your browser to ensure that WebAssembly is supported. Finally, we briefly reviewed some additional tools you can install for your platform to aid in development. 

In Chapter 4, Installing the Required Dependencies, we'll install the required dependencies and test out the toolchain.