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

The Emscripten module versus the WebAssembly object


In the previous chapter, we briefly covered Emscripten's Module object and how to load it in the browser. The Module object provides several convenient methods and differs significantly from the browser's WebAssembly object. In this section, we're going to review Emscripten's Module object in greater detail. We'll also discuss the difference between Emscripten's Module and the objects described in WebAssembly's JavaScript API.

What is the Emscripten module?

Emscripten's official site provides the following definition for the Module object:

"Module is a global JavaScript object with attributes that Emscripten-generated code calls at various points in its execution."

Not only is the loading procedure different from WebAssembly's compile and instantiate functions, but the Module provides some helpful functionality out of the box that would otherwise require a custom implementation in WebAssembly. The Module is available in a global scope (window...