A masochist's guide to web development

Summary

A masochist’s guide to web development Table of contents Introduction I have recently worked on making a web application out of my latest Rubik’s cube optimal solver. This involved building a rather complex C code base (with multithreading, SIMD, callback functions and whatnot) to WebAssembly via Emscripten, and writing a minimal amount of JavaScript and HTML for the frontend. This whole process was complex, tiring and at times frustrating - but eventually it was a success! Not only I accomplished my goal, but I have learnt a lot along the way. After finishing the work, I decided to write down all that I have learnt and share it with the world with this post. You may be wondering why one should do such a thing instead of either rewriting their code base in a more web-friendly language, or distributing their app using a native GUI framework. The main reason to use WebAssembly is that it can provide near-native performance (or so they claim) while running inside a web browser; this gives you all the portability of a web app without too much of a performance drawback, something that would not be possible with an interpreted language such as JavaScript. So, what is this blog post? A tutorial for web development? I am not sure about this, but if it is, it is definitely not a normal one. As the title suggests, you should not start from this guide unless you just love banging your head against the wall. If you are looking for a sane guide to web development, I strongly advise you head on to the Mozilla Developer Network tutorials page and start from there. But if you are a C or C++ developer looking to port a program or library to the web, then you are in the right place. With this post I am going to walk you through the process of building an increasingly complex library that can run in a web browser. Make sure you are sitting comfortably and be ready to sweat, because I am not going to shy away from the hard stuff and the complicated details. To follow this tutorial you ...