Sprite Animations in WebAssembly with SDL

At the time of writing, Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is the only 2D rendering library integrated into Emscripten for use in WebAssembly. But, even as more rendering libraries become available, SDL is a highly supported rendering library that has been ported to a large number of platforms and will remain both relevant and useful for WebAssembly and C++ development into the foreseeable future. Using SDL to render to WebGL saves us a tremendous amount of time, because we do not have to write the code to interface between our WebAssembly C++ code and WebGL ourselves. The large community also offers support and documentation. You can find more SDL resources online at libsdl.org.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Using SDL in WebAssembly
• Rendering a sprite to the canvas
• Animating a sprite
• Moving the sprite