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

Cook the Books – making WebAssembly accountable


As mentioned before, WebAssembly's current feature set is rather limited. We can use Emscripten to greatly extend the capabilities of a web application, but that carries the cost of noncompliance with the official specification and the addition of glue code. We can still use WebAssembly effectively today, which brings us to the application we'll build in this chapter. In this section, we will review the libraries and tools we'll use to build the application, as well as a brief overview of its functionality.

Overview and functionality

In WebAssembly's current form, we can pass numbers between a Wasm module and JavaScript code with relative ease. An accounting application seems like a logical choice in terms of real-world applicability. The only contention I have with accounting software is that it's a little boring (no offense). We're going to spice it up a bit by building in some unethical accounting practices. The application is named Cook the...