sokol-tools VS sokol

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.

I'm using Dear ImGui for my cross-platform code (which includes running in browsers):

- https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/

- https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64-ui.html

- (start these samples by clicking on the little "UI" icon) https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/

Platform abstraction is handled through the sokol headers: https://github.com/floooh/sokol

I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.

If you're looking for something like this, Sokol is a much simpler alternative:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

It doesn't support vulkan though, but if that's important to you you're probably much better off just using vulkan directly since it's supported on all the major platforms.

All I can do is give you a couple of Github ticket links where users of my libraries stumbled over the issue (and with different symptoms):

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/376

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/404

- https://github.com/floooh/cimgui-sokol-starterkit/issues/6

We then added a dummy call to a no-op pthread function, so that users can better figure out that they need to use -pthread because now they get a linker error instead of a runtime crash or hang. This has since reduced the 'support overhead' quite a bit:

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/pull/456

My stuff for instance:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

...inspired by:

https://github.com/nothings/stb

But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).

I have never personally used it but I'm pretty sure sokol has an audio library that might be what you are after.

And I asked floooh for similar thoughts on making a website with sokol here: https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/825

It's not Rust and TS, instead C and JS, but Emscripten has a very nice way of integrating C/C++ and JS (you can just embed snippets of Javascript inside C/C++ source files), e.g. starting at this line, there's a couple of embedded Javascript functions which can be called like C functions directly from the "C side":

https://github.com/floooh/sokol/blob/4535a3b4be59eb912e77e04...