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

Porting to Emscripten


You have a good understanding of the code base, so now it's time to start porting it over with Emscripten. Fortunately, we're able to leverage some of the browser's features to simplify the code and completely remove a third-party library. In this section, we're going to update the code to compile to a Wasm module and JavaScript glue file and update some of the functionality to utilize the browser.

Preparing for porting

The /output-wasm folder contains the end result, but I recommend that you create a copy of the /output-native folder so that you can follow along with the porting process. There are VS Code Tasks set up for both native compilation and Emscripten compilation. If you get stuck, you can always reference the /output-wasm contents. Make sure you open your copied folder in VS Code (File | Open and select your copied folder), otherwise you won't be able to use the Tasks feature.

 

 

What's changing?

This game is an ideal candidate for porting because it uses SDL2...