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 overall development workflow when working with WebAssembly. In order to generate our .wasm files, we're using Emscripten, which requires the installation of the EMSDK. Prior to reviewing any installation details, we discussed the technologies under the hood and described how they relate to each other and to WebAssembly. We covered each of the steps required to get EMDSK working locally on your computer. The installation process for the EMSDK on each platform was presented, as well as the installation and configuration instructions for the EMSDK. After installing the EMSDK , we tested the compiler (no to). That was the emcc command we ran in the previous section. Using theemcccommand on a simple C code file to ensure Emscripten was working correctly. In the next chapter, we'll walk through the process of creating and loading your first module!