December 2021
Intermediate to advanced
332 pages
8h 36m
English
Content preview from WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Dr. Carl Sagan
This chapter will introduce WebAssembly and provide context for its expansive reach. In some sense it is a culmination of the evolution of the web over the last several decades. There is quite a bit of history to cover to make sense of it all. If you are not a fan of history and exposition, you can skip this chapter and go to directly to Chapter 2, but I hope you don’t. I think it is important to understand why this technology is so important and where it came from.
What WebAssembly Offers
One of the greatest skills an engineer can develop is the ability to assess what a new technology brings to the table. As Dr. Fred Brooks of the University of North Carolina reminds us, there are no “silver bullets”; everything has trade-offs. Complexity is often not eliminated with a new technology, but is simply moved somewhere else. So when something does actually change what is possible or how we do our work in a positive direction, it deserves our attention and we should figure out why.
When trying to understand the implications of something new, I usually start by trying to determine the motivation of those behind it. Another good source of insight is where an alternative has fallen short. What has come before, and how does it influence this new technology we are trying to decipher? As in art and music, we are constantly borrowing good ideas from multiple sources, so to truly understand why WebAssembly ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.