WebAssembly has allowed us to do things that were previously impossible. I hope this post helps you take the first step on your WebAssembly journey.

Have you ever experienced the pain of porting legacy code in C/C++ to JavaScript? Have you ever wished you could reuse your legacy application or have near-native performance in your web app?

If your answer to any of the questions above is yes, WebAssembly can help!

Getting to know WebAssembly

According to the documentation:

It is a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance and provides languages such as C/C++ and Rust with a compilation target so that they can run on the web.

What this basically means is, WebAssembly provides a way to convert our C/C++ code to a particular format which can then be easily consumed.

But how does WebAssembly do that?

WebAssembly is like a new language but you, as a developer, don’t have to write it because it acts as a compilation target for your low-level languages like C/C++, or Rust.

So, when you have your C or C++ application, you can compile it to a .wasm file which then can be imported into your web application.

WebAssembly even allows you to pass and access data/variables to and from your JS app.

Advantages of using WebAssembly

• You can finally outsource performance-intensive tasks like computations for 3D games, virtual, and augmented reality or computer vision to C/C++ or Rust-like performant languages
• There are tons of amazing legacy libraries written in C/C++ which can now be seamlessly integrated into your web application. You can find some of them here
• You can write super fast and beautiful applications (Google Earth, for example)

WebAssembly gives extended capability to the web

So now that we have seen what WebAssembly can do, let us create our first game to see how it works.

Creating your very first tic-tac-toe game in WASM

We will be building a 3×3 tic-tac-toe game. Our game logic includes:

• Computing which player has won
• Calculating if there is no winner
• Indicating pending moves

The entire game logic is written in C++.

#webassembly #game-development #javascript #cplusplus #developer