sokol-tools VS libxev

I would really love being able to take any POSIX command line tool, compile that to WASI, and run it on (at least) Linux, Windows and macOS like a regular executable without having to install a separate WASI runtime.

I'm a 'WASI convert' since I was able to take an ancient 8-bit assembler written in the mid-90's (http://xi6.com/projects/asmx/), compile that as-is with the WASI SDK (https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk), and then integrate it into a VSCode extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.v...).

A similar problem is I have is a shader cross-compiler (https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools) which needs to run Linux, macOS and Windows and takes too long to build locally, thus I currently need to distribute that as pre-built binaries. Compiling this to WASI works, but the filesystem access restrictions built into current wasm runtimes are a hassle to manage, and it would require a WASI runtime to be separately installed).

Sokol also provides a solution for shader cross-compilation (https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools/blob/master/docs/sokol...), so you only need to write your shaders once no matter if you're targeting OpenGL, Metal, or DirectX.

There are other tools you could use out there with IGL, but Sokol's solution streamlines the whole process.

> but that is only for software written in C, it does not work with C++.

I have a pretty complex C++ command line tool which works just fine with MUSL (https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools). What potential problems should I be aware of?

In practice it works very well though, I experimented replacing cmake with build.zig for a 'not-quite-trivial' C++ project, and tbh for cross-platform code that's a lot nicer wrestling with cmake and all the C/C++ compiler toolchain differences:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools/blob/master/build.zig

Yes, here is an example:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools/blob/master/build.zig

Compared to cmake, this means giving up IDE support like Xcode or Visual Studio though, it's really just a pure build system.

io_uring support is obviously great & excellent, fulfills the "high performance" part well.

i was not expecting "Wasm + WASI" support at all. that's very cool. implementation is wasi_poll.zig (https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev/blob/main/src/backend/wa...). not to be unkind, but this makes me wonder very much if WASI is already missing the mark, if polling is the solution offered.

gotta say, this is some very understandable clean code. further enhancing my sense that i really ought be playing with zig.

You might be interested in a pure Zig implementation of these primitives by Mitchell in his libxev library: https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

- one from the Tigerbeetle DB