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

Summary


In this chapter, we ported a Tetris clone written in C++ that used SDL2 to Emscripten so it could be run in the browser with WebAssembly. We covered the rules of Tetris and how they map to the logic within the existing codebase. We also reviewed each file in the existing code base individually and which changes had to be made to successfully compile to a Wasm file and JavaScript glue code. After updating the existing code, we created the required HTML and CSS files, then configured a build step with the appropriate emcc flags. Once built, the game was run using Emscripten's emrun command.

In Chapter 9Integrating with Node.js, we're going to discuss how to integrate WebAssembly into Node.js and the benefits this integration provides.