A holiday treat: Chapters 9 & 10
Hey friends,
It's been a while! We've been hard at work on the book and have some juicy updates to share with you, just in time for the holiday season.
The TLDR is that the core technical content of the book is largely done! There's one more deep dive chapter coming ("What makes WebAssembly safe?") and some minor edits, but we're nearly at the finish line.
So, if you've been holding off on buying, you might not want to wait any longer! We'll be officially launching the book in early 2025 — and accordingly raising the price. Now's your chance to snap a copy before that happens. 😉
Buy "WebAssembly from the Ground Up" now for $29
Now for the nitty gritty details…
Chapter 9: Memory
Back in October, we released the first draft of Chapter 9: Memory. It covers WebAssembly's linear memory, and the load and store instructions for i32 values. It certainly wasn't an easy chapter to write; it was hard to figure out the right level of detail when many of our readers might not be familiar with manual memory management at all!
Here's a sneak peak:
We had originally planned a single chapter about memory, but there was enough content to cover that we ended up splitting it into two chapters. Which brings us to…
Chapter 10: Arrays and Strings
This past Monday, we released the draft of Chapter 10: Arrays and Strings. Building on what you learned about memory in Chapter 9, this chapter adds support to Wafer for dynamically-allocated arrays, as well as strings. To support that we even needed to build a really simple memory allocator.
With support for strings, we can finally implement "Hello, world":
Many programming books start with a small program that prints "Hello, world.”
— WebAssembly from the Ground Up (@WasmGroundUp) December 11, 2024
But this book is different. It's only at the end of Chapter 10 that we're ready to tackle that. 😅
Looking forward to releasing the draft very soon! pic.twitter.com/QQDgrm8f3Z
Odds & Ends
- Like many of you, we're spending a lot of time on Bluesky.! Give us a follow: @wasmgroundup.com, Patrick, Mariano.
- Safari 18.2 is out, with a couple of big WebAssembly features: WasmGC and tail calls.
- Patrick loved this talk by Will Willson at Systems Distributed '23: Testing a Single-Node, Single Threaded, Distributed System Written in 1985.
That's all for now, and happy holidays to those who celebrate!
✌️,
Patrick + Mariano