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

Building the C portion


The C portion of the application will aggregate transaction and category amounts. The calculations we perform in C could be done just as easily in JavaScript, but WebAssembly is ideal for computation. We'll dive deeper into more complex usage of C/C++ in Chapter 8Porting a Game with Emscripten, but for now we're trying to limit our scope to what can be done within the confines of the Core Specification. In this section, we'll write some C code to demonstrate how to integrate WebAssembly with a web application without the use of Emscripten.

Overview

We will write some C functions that calculate the grand totals as well as the ending balances for raw and cooked transactions. In addition to calculating the grand totals, we need to calculate the totals for each category for display in the pie charts. All of these calculations will be performed in a single C file and compiled down to a single Wasm file that will be instantiated when the application loads. C can be a little...