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

Questions


  1. What does SDL stand for?
  2. In addition to JavaScript, HTML, and Wasm, what other output type can you generate with the -o flag for the emcc command?
  3. What advantages does using Emscripten's pre-generated loading code offer?
  4. What must you name your function in the C/C++ file to ensure it automatically executes the compiled output in the browser?
  5. Why can't we use just the Wasm file output without the "glue" code when using ported libraries?
  6. What is the keyboard shortcut in VS Code for running your default build task?
  7. Why do we need the getDefaultEnv() method in the Wasm loading code?
  8. Which five items are required for the importObj.env object passed into the Wasm instantiation code for a Wasm module created with Emscripten?