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 and configuring the EMSDK


If you have all of the prerequisites installed, you're ready to install the EMSDK. The process for getting the EMSDK up and running is relatively straightforward. In this section, we cover the installation process for the EMSDK and demonstrate how to update your VS Code C/C++ configuration to accommodate for Emscripten.

Installation process across all platforms

First, select a folder to install the EMSDK. I created a folder at ~/Tooling (or C:\Users\Mike\Tooling on Windows). In a terminal, cd into the folder you just created and run this command:

git clone https://github.com/juj/emsdk.git

Once the clone process is complete, follow the instructions to complete the installation from the section below that corresponds to your platform.

Installation on macOS and Ubuntu

Once the clone process is complete, run each of the commands from the following code snippet. If you see a message recommending that you run git pull instead of ./emsdk update, use the git pull command...