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 discussed the advantages of integrating WebAssembly with Node.js and demonstrated how Node.js could be used on the server and client side. We evaluated an Express application that uses a Wasm module to perform calculations on accounting transactions. We then reviewed a browser-based application that utilizes Webpack to import and call functions from a C file without having to write any Wasm instantiation code. Finally, we saw how the Jest testing framework can be leveraged to test a compiled module and ensure it's functioning correctly. In Chapter 10Advanced Tools and Upcoming Features, we'll cover advanced tools and discuss the features that are on the horizon for WebAssembly.