Summary

In this chapter, we learned what WebAssembly is and why it will be the future of application development on the web. We learned why we need WebAssembly, even though we already have a robust language like JavaScript. We learned why WebAssembly is so much faster than JavaScript, and how it has the potential to increase its performance lead. We have also discussed the possibility of WebAssembly replacing JavaScript as the de facto standard for application development on the web.

We have discussed the practical side of creating a WebAssembly module as it is done today using Emscripten and LLVM. We have talked about WebAssembly text and how it is structured. We have also discussed using Emscripten to compile our first WebAssembly module, as well as using it to create the HTML and JavaScript glue code to run that module.

In the next chapter, we will go into further detail on how to use Emscripten to create our WebAssembly module, as well as the HTML/CSS and JavaScript used to drive it.