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 and running the game


With the code updated and the required web assets present, it's time to build and test out the game. The compilation step is similar to the previous examples in this book, but we're going to use a different technique to run the game. In this section, we're going to configure the build task to accommodate for the C++ files and run the application using a feature provided by Emscripten.

 

Building with VS Code tasks

We're going to configure the build in two ways: with VS Code tasks and a Makefile. Makefiles are nice if you prefer to use a different editor than VS Code. The /.vscode/tasks.json file already contains the tasks you'll need to build the project. The Emscripten build step is the default (a set of native build tasks is also present). Let's walk through each task in the tasks array and review what's taking place. The first task deletes any existing compiled output files prior to building:

{
  "label": "Remove Existing Web Files",
  "type": "shell",
  "command...