Emscripten and the EMSDK

We'll use Emscripten to compile our C/C++ code down to .wasm files. Up to this point, Emscripten has only briefly been mentioned in a general context. Since we'll use this tool and the corresponding Emscripten SDK (EMSDK) in the build process, it's important to understand what each technology is and the part it plays in the development workflow. In this section, we'll describe Emscripten's purpose and discuss its relationship to the EMSDK.

Emscripten overview

So what is Emscripten? Wikipedia provides the following definition:

"Emscripten is a source-to-source compiler that runs as a back end to the LLVM compiler and produces a subset of JavaScript known as asm.js. It can also produce WebAssembly."

We discussed source-to-source compilers (or transpilers) in the first chapter and used TypeScript as an example. Transpilers convert source code in one programming language to equivalent source code in another programming language. To elaborate on Emscripten running as a backend...