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

Converting WASM into WAST

Sometimes, for debugging or understanding, we need to know what the WASM is doing. WABT has a wasm2wat converter. It helps to convert WASM into WAST format:

$ /path/to/build/directory/of/wabt/wasm2wat add.wasm
(module
  (type (;0;) (func (param i32 i32) (result i32)))
  (func (;0;) (type 0) (param i32 i32) (result i32)
    local.get 0
    local.get 1
    i32.add))

Running the previous command will convert add.wasm back into WAST format and print the output in the console.

If you want to save it as a file, you can do so by using the -o flag:

$ /path/to/build/directory/of/wabt/wasm2wat add.wasm -o new_
  add.wat

This command creates a new_add.wat file.

To check the various options supported by wasm2wat, we can run the following command:

$ wasm2wat --help
usage: wasm2wat [options] filename
 
  Read a file in the WebAssembly binary format, and...