December 2021
Intermediate to advanced
332 pages
8h 36m
English
Content preview from WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide
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Chapter 5. Using C/C++ and WebAssembly
The C programming language—a language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language.
Anonymous
This begins a bit of a turning point in our discussion. Up until now, we have been focusing exclusively on WebAssembly and its immediate group of related tools and technologies. As we have seen, this is a useful way to explore what the platform offers, but it is an inefficient way to think about developing new software. Higher-level programming languages have long elevated our profession beyond the initial details of working with low-level instruction sets. It is simply easier and more efficient to express logic in syntactically clean and semantically rich languages.
To really appreciate what WebAssembly is providing, we need to consider one of the many source languages that compile down to it. The point is that not every problem is suitably expressed in JavaScript, so having the option to use another language for its performance, clarity of expression, or to simply reuse existing code is appealing.
The C language is one of the most important and widely used programming languages in the world.1 I started playing around with it in high school on my Atari ST computer. I had read about it in Computer Language magazine and a friend gave me a copy of the seminal, eponymously named book The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and the late, great Dennis Ritchie.2
There is an immense amount of software available ...
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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.