Introduction to WebAssembly [old article]

I won’t say that I know much about WebAssembly since I'm just beginning
to use it as of this writing.

I became caught up in all this WebAssembly hype and how it’s the next
big thing that is going to transform the web, so I decided to give it a
try. I am not going to attempt to go very deep into what it is but what
I am going to do is to give a beginner-level lesson on starting to use
it.

What WebAssembly aims to do is to provide a chain to compile languages
such as Rust, C, C++ directly to web assembly and thus allow the web
developers to write in the language of their choice and run it inside
a browser. WebAssembly also aims to make things blazingly fast as
its name was inspired by the Assembly Language.

I have listed the prerequisites for Web assembly, to run a basic example
like hello.cpp, you will have to type this in the terminal:

``$ emcc hello.cpp -s WASM=1 -o hello.html``
for newbies like me (as of this writing) the *emcc command was
 not found*
so I had to go to the Emscripten website and find the installation 
instructions. But not to worry, I have chosen to simply lay it out
for you below:

``$ git clone https://github.com/emscripten-core/emsdk.git``

``$ cd emsdk``

``$ git pull``

``$ ./emsdk install latest``

**Make the “latest” SDK “active” for the current user**
 (writes .emscripten file)
``$ ./emsdk activate latest``

**PATH and other environment variables in the current terminal**
``$ source ./emsdk_env.sh``

**Note: My default development environment is Linux.**
Other prerequisite tools are needed but ones that normally come
preloaded with most Linux distributions include python3, cmake and git
but if your chosen distribution doesn’t have them(which I doubt) type
these.

``$ sudo apt-get install python3``
``$ sudo apt-get install cmake``
``$ sudo apt-get install git-core``

After doing all that now run the initial lines again.

`` $ emcc hello.cpp -s WASM=1 -o hello.html``

3 files are generated:
- hello.html
- hello.js
- hello.wasm

Upon opening the generated HTML file, a webpage powered by emscripten
will pop up in your default browser.

And now…let the Journey begin.

# NOTE:
This is one of my old blog posts(Original post Date: September 2019)