Compiling C without the glue code

If we want to use WebAssembly according to the official specification, without the extra features that Emscripten provides, we need to pass some flags to the emcc command and ensure we're writing code that can be used by WebAssembly with relative ease. In the Writing the example C code section, we wrote a program that rendered a blue rectangle that moved diagonally across a red canvas. It utilized one of Emscripten's ported libraries, SDL2. In this section, we're going to write and compile some C code that doesn't rely on Emscripten's helper methods and ported libraries.

C code for WebAssembly

Before we get to the C code we'll use for our WebAssembly module, let's try an experiment. Open the CLI in the /chapter-05-create-load-module folder, and try running this command:

emcc with-glue.c -Os -s WASM=1 -s USE_SDL=2 -s SIDE_MODULE=1 -s BINARYEN_ASYNC_COMPILATION=0 -o try-with-glue.wasm

You should see a try-with-glue.wasm file appear in VS Code's file explorer panel...