cib VS skybison

[2]: https://tbfleming.github.io/cib/

Here are some more ports of LLVM and clang to the browser:

* https://github.com/kripken/llvm-js

* https://github.com/tbfleming/cib

* https://github.com/jprendes/emception

LLVM just does pure computation, really, so it's not hard to port to wasm - much simple than say Python (which has also been ported several times). The only challenges with LLVM are the build system (which has self-execution), working around some issues like clang wanting to open a subprocess, and adding some ifdefs.

That is half of what I would need for a project, the other half being Clang itself running in the browser (to use for teaching), in theory there is [1] since many years, but in practice it never worked for me (even now I get "Runtime error: memory access out of bounds")

[1] https://tbfleming.github.io/cib/

It seems that there's a project doing exactly that: https://github.com/tbfleming/cib

It takes some work (mostly due to LLVM building code to run later in its build system as it goes), but it's very feasible. LLVM has been ported to Wasm (and before that to JS) many times, for example:

https://github.com/jprendes/emception (2021)

https://github.com/tbfleming/cib (2017)

https://github.com/kripken/llvm.js (2012)

I agree it would be great to see this repl running 100% in the browser!

The parent comment is referring to the primary Python interpreter and runtime, CPython, not to libraries. There are of course other Python implementations, but [the only C++ one](https://github.com/tekknolagi/skybison appears to be unsupported.

Kind of! In my fork I run microbenchmarks on each PR. So you can see on, for example, https://github.com/tekknolagi/skybison/pull/456, that the change had a 3.6% improvement on the compilation benchmark. If you expand further, you can see a comparison with CPython 3.8. Unfortunately Skybison is still on 3.8.

This is also the pointer tagging scheme from the Ghuloum paper. I did not design it. Another tagging scheme I did not design is the Skybison scheme, which uses 0bXXX...XX0 to tag integers and 0bXXX...001 to tag heap pointers. This makes heap reads very easy (bias by -1 in addressing mode).

Skybison is a Python interpreter and I'm curious what the results look like. We also have some benchmarks in benchmarks/benchmarks.

If you take a look at the Skybison Python runtime, I would be happy to chat and help you poke around integrating it: https://github.com/tekknolagi/skybison

I am, in fits and starts, writing a bytecode optimizer for Skybison that takes advantage of type information.