Book Image

Practical WebAssembly

By : Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen
Book Image

Practical WebAssembly

By: Sendil Kumar Nellaiyapen

Overview of this book

Rust is an open source language tuned toward safety, concurrency, and performance. WebAssembly brings all the capabilities of the native world into the JavaScript world. Together, Rust and WebAssembly provide a way to create robust and performant web applications. They help make your web applications blazingly fast and have small binaries. Developers working with JavaScript will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to developing faster and maintainable code. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, examples, and self-assessment questions, you’ll begin by exploring WebAssembly, using the various tools provided by the ecosystem, and understanding how to use WebAssembly and JavaScript together to build a high-performing application. You’ll then learn binary code to work with a variety of tools that help you to convert native code into WebAssembly. The book will introduce you to the world of Rust and the ecosystem that makes it easy to build/ship WebAssembly-based applications. By the end of this WebAssembly Rust book, you’ll be able to create and ship your own WebAssembly applications using Rust and JavaScript, understand how to debug, and use the right tools to optimize and deliver high-performing applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to WebAssembly
5
Section 2: WebAssembly Tools
9
Section 3: Rust and WebAssembly

Exploring the WebAssembly text format

Machines understand a bunch of 1s and 0s. We optimize the binary to make it run faster and more efficiently. The more concise and optimal the instructions are, the more efficient and performant the machine will be. But for people, it is difficult to contextually analyze and understand a huge blob of 1s and 0s. That is the very reason why we started abstracting and creating high-level programming languages.

In the WebAssembly world, we convert human-readable programming languages, such as Rust, Go, and C/C++, into binary code. These binaries are a bunch of instructions with opcodes and operands. These instructions make the machine highly efficient but contextually make it difficult for us to understand.

Why should we worry about the readability of the binary generated? Because it helps us to understand the code, which helps while debugging the code.

WebAssembly provides the WebAssembly text format, WAST or WAT. WAST is a human-readable...