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

Chapter 4: Understanding WebAssembly Binary Toolkit

The Rust compiler chain converts Rust code into WebAssembly binary. But the generated binaries are both size- and performance-optimized. It is difficult to understand, debug, and validate binary code (it is a bunch of hexadecimal numbers). Converting WebAssembly binary back into the original source code is very difficult. WebAssembly Binary Toolkit (WABT) helps to convert WebAssembly binary into a human-readable format, such as the WebAssembly text (WAST) format or C-native code.

Note

Native code here does not refer to the original source of truth; instead, it refers to C-native code that the machine interprets.

WebAssembly Binary Toolkit is abbreviated as WABT and pronounced as "wabbit." WABT provides a set of tools for converting, analyzing, and testing WebAssembly binaries.

In this chapter, we will explore WABT and how it helps to convert WebAssembly binary into various formats and why it is useful. We will...