WebAssembly in Action

“Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.” — Jeff Atwood, Cofounder of StackOverflow

“Atwood’s Law” is driven by the idea that all applications will ultimately wind up on the web and therefore must be written in JavaScript. WebAssembly may be your way out! With WebAssembly, you can write in nearly any modern language and run your code in the browser through a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment that can be embedded in a web browser and other platforms. Getting set up and moving with WebAssembly requires you to modify your web dev process; WebAssembly in Action will get you started quickly and guide you through real-world examples and detailed diagrams that help you create, run, and debug WebAssembly modules.

WebAssembly in Action introduces the WebAssembly stack and walks you through the process of writing and running browser-based applications. Expert developer Gerard Gallant gives you a firm foundation of the structure of a module, HTML basics, JavaScript Promises, and the WebAssembly JavaScript API. After building simple modules, you’ll delve deeper into dynamic linking of multiple modules at runtime, working with NodeJS modules, building modules with C/C++ and the Emscripten toolkit, and running a UI-independent thread with an HTML5 web worker.

To ensure your code is error-free, you’ll also learn about WebAssembly Text Format, which is vital for debugging. You’ll reinforce your learning with real-world examples and get a glimpse of features-to-come, including host bindings and garbage collection. WebAssembly makes it possible to create apps for online video gaming, image and video editing, virtual reality, peer-to-peer collaboration, music streaming, and many more without adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of JavaScript. This well-rounded tutorial is your ticket!

what's inside

● The WebAssembly format

● Dynamic linking of multiple modules at runtime

● Communicating between modules and JavaScript

● Debugging modules

● Unreleased features like host bindings and garbage collection!