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

Compiling C with Emscripten glue code


In Chapter 4Installing the Required Dependencies, you wrote and compiled a simple three-line program to ensure your Emscripten installation was valid. We passed several flags to the emcc command that were required to only output a single .wasm file. By passing other flags to the emcc command, we can output JavaScript glue code alongside the .wasm file as well as an HTML file to handle the loading process. In this section, we're going to write a more complex C program and compile it with the output options that Emscripten offers.

Writing the example C code

We didn't include any header files or pass in any functions in the example we covered in Chapter 4, Installing the Required Dependencies. Since the intention of the code was solely to test if the compiler installation was valid, there wasn't much need. Emscripten offers a lot of extra functionality that enables us to interact with our C and C++ code with JavaScript and vice versa. Some of these capabilities...