Implementing John Conway's Game of Life in WebAssembly using C

John Conway's Game of Life is a type of cellular automaton, which is essentially a simulation of a grid of cells that follow a set of rules. The Game of Life is played on a two-dimensional grid of square cells, where each cell can be either alive or dead. The rules of the Game of Life are based on the state of each cell and its eight neighboring cells. At each turn, the state of each cell is updated according to the following rules:

The rules of the Game of Life are based on the state of each cell and its eight neighboring cells. At each turn, the state of each cell is updated according to the following rules:

  • Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
  • Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
  • Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
  • Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

These rules are applied to each cell simultaneously, and the resulting state of the grid is used as the starting state for the next turn. By repeating this process, the Game of Life can generate a wide variety of patterns, some of which are stable, some of which oscillate, and some of which eventually die out or grow infinitely.

The Game of Life is interesting because it demonstrates how simple rules can lead to complex and unpredictable behavior. It has applications in various fields, including biology, physics, and computer science, and has been studied extensively by researchers and enthusiasts alike.

Our objective is to develop an implementation of John Conway's Game of Life using WebAssembly, which we will then make accessible through Javascript. In order to do this, we will use C as our programming language and compile it to WebAssembly. This will involve converting the C code into a format that can be understood by WebAssembly, which is a low-level language designed for efficient execution in web browsers.

Once we have compiled the C code to WebAssembly, we will need to initialize and call the WebAssembly module from Javascript. This will involve setting up the necessary data structures, shared memory and functions in Javascript to interface with the WebAssembly code, so that we can pass inputs to the Game of Life implementation and receive outputs from it.

More to come...


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