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

Setting up the project


WebAssembly hasn't been around long enough to have established best practices with regard to folder structure, file naming conventions, and so on. If you were to search for best practices for C/C++ or JavaScript projects, you'd encounter a great deal of conflicting advice and strongly held opinions. With that in mind, let's spend this section setting up our project with the required configuration files.

The code for this project is located in the /chapter-07-cook-the-books folder in the learn-webassembly repository. You must have this code available when we get to the JavaScript portion of the application. I won't be providing the source code for all of the Vue components in the book, so you need to copy them from the repository.

Configuring for Node.js

In the interest of keeping the application as simple as possible, we'll avoid a build/bundling tool like Webpack or Rollup.js. This allows us to cut down on the number of required dependencies and ensures that any issues...