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

Client-side WebAssembly with Webpack


Web applications continue to grow in complexity and size. Simply serving up a few handwritten HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files is not feasible for large applications. To manage this complexity, web developers use bundlers to allow for modularization, ensure browser compatibility, and reduce the size of JavaScript files. In this section, we're going to be using a popular bundler, Webpack, to utilize Wasm without using emcc.

 

 

Overview of the project

The example Webpack application extends the functionality of the C code we wrote in the Compiling C without the glue code section of Chapter 5Creating and Loading a WebAssembly Module. Instead of showing a blue rectangle bouncing around a red background, we'll show an alien in a spaceship bouncing around the Horsehead Nebula. The collision detection functionality has been modified to accommodate for bouncing within a rectangle, so the movement of the spaceship will be random. The code for this section is located...