What this book covers

Chapter 1, What is WebAssembly?, describes the origins of WebAssembly and provides a high-level overview of the technology. It covers how WebAssembly can be used, which programming languages are supported, and its current limitations.

Chapter 2, Elements of WebAssembly – Wat, Wasm, and the JavaScript API, outlines the elements that comprise WebAssembly. It provides a detailed explanation of the text and binary formats, as well as the corresponding JavaScript and Web APIs.

Chapter 3, Setting Up a Development Environment, walks through the tooling used to develop with WebAssembly. It provides the installation instructions for each platform and provides recommendations for improving the development experience.

Chapter 4, Installing the Required Dependencies, provides instructions for installing the toolchain requirements for each platform. By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to compile C and C++ to WebAssembly modules.

Chapter 5, Creating and Loading a WebAssembly Module, explains how to generate a WebAssembly module using Emscripten and how flags are passed to the compiler affect the resulting output. It describes the techniques for loading a WebAssembly module in the browser.

Chapter 6, Interacting with JavaScript and Debugging, elaborates on the differences between Emscripten's Module object and the browser's global WebAssembly object. This chapter describes the features Emscripten provides as well as instructions for generating source maps.

Chapter 7, Creating an Application from Scratch, walks through the creation of a JavaScript accounting application that interacts with a WebAssembly module. We will write C code to calculate values from accounting transactions and pass the data between JavaScript and the compiled WebAssembly module.

Chapter 8, Porting a Game with Emscripten, takes a step-by-step approach to porting an existing C++ game to WebAssembly using Emscripten. After reviewing the existing C++ code base, changes are made to the appropriate files to enable the game to run in the browser.

Chapter 9, Integrating with Node.js, demonstrates how Node.js and npm can be used with WebAssembly on the server and client side. The chapter covers the use of WebAssembly in an Express application, integrating WebAssembly with webpack, and testing a WebAssembly module using Jest.

Chapter 10, Advanced Tools and Upcoming Features, covers advanced tools, use cases, and new WebAssembly features currently in the process of standardization. This chapter describes WABT, Binaryen, and the tooling available online. In this chapter, you'll learn how to compile WebAssembly modules using LLVM and how WebAssembly modules can be used with Web Workers. The chapter wraps up with a description of the standardization process and a review of some of the exciting features in the process of being added to the specification.