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

Understanding a few other tools provided by WABT

In addition to the converters, WABT also provides a few tools that help us to understand WASM better. In this section, let's explore the following tools provided by WABT:

  • wasm-objdump
  • wasm-strip
  • wasm-validate
  • wasm-interp

wasm-objdump

Object code is nothing more than a sequence of instructions or statements in the computer language. Object code is what the compiler produces. The object code is then collected together and then stored inside the object file. The object file is the metadata holder for linking and debugging information. The machine code in the object file is not directly executable, but it provides valuable information when debugging and also helps with linking.

Note

objdump is the tool that is available in POSIX systems that provides a way to disassemble the binary format and print the assembly format of the code that is running.

The wasm-objdump tool provides the following options...