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

Calling JavaScript functions from C/C++


Accessing JavaScript's functionality from C/C++ code allows for added flexibility when working with WebAssembly. The methodologies and means of utilizing JavaScript differ considerably between Emscripten's glue code and Wasm-only implementations. In this section, we will cover the various ways you can integrate JavaScript into your C/C++ code with and without Emscripten.

Interacting with JavaScript using glue code

Emscripten provides several techniques for integrating JavaScript with your C/C++ code. The techniques available differ in implementation and complexity, and some only apply to specific execution environments (for example, the browser). Deciding which one to use is contingent on your specific use case. We'll focus on the emscripten_run_script() function and inlining JavaScript with EM_* wrappers. The content in the following sections was taken from the Interacting with Code section of Emscripten's site, which can be viewed at https://kripken...