The past few chapters have been all about how to leverage JavaScript in the modern web landscape. We have looked at frontend development, backend development, and even building and deploying applications through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Now, we are going to take a step back and look at two topics that can help enhance our development with native speed code.

WebAssembly is a specification for assembly for the web. Assembly is a one-to-one mapping for the language that computers understand. WebAssembly, on the other hand, is a one-to-one mapping for a virtual computer that can run these instructions. In this chapter, we will explore WebAssembly and how we can port native applications to the browser.

Overall, we will explore the following topics:

• Understanding WebAssembly
• Setting up our environment to write WebAssembly
• Writing WebAssembly modules
• Porting C applications
• Taking a look at a major application

By the end of this chapter, we should be able to develop not only in the WebAssembly text format but also in C for the web. We will also be able to turn binary WebAssembly into its text format in order to diagnose possible issues with our ported applications.