wajic VS cib

This is a slim alternative to Emscripten which focuses only on the C/C++ <=> JS interoperability part:

https://github.com/schellingb/wajic

There's actually a super interesting project called wajic here:

https://github.com/schellingb/wajic

It's basically clang plus wasm-opt and some magic pixie dust which enables some of the most important features of Emscripten, but without the whole 'technology zoo' :)

There's now an interesting alternative to Emscripten called WaJIC:

https://github.com/schellingb/wajic

Enables most of the "Emscripten magic" (like embedding Javascript code into C/C++ files), but in a more bare bones package (apart from clang it essentially just uses the wasm-opt tool from Binaryen for post-processing).

(to be clear, wajic has fewer out-of-the-box features than Emscripten, but it might be an alternative for very small projects which don't need all the compatibility shims which are coming with Emscripten, while still providing tools for calling between C/C++ and JS.

Since I haven't seen it mentioned in the comments yet, here's another interesting project in the general area of "WASM without Emscripten":

https://github.com/schellingb/wajic

This provides an alternative implementation of Emscripten's EM_JS() magic (embed Javascript snippets right in the C/C++ source code), but without the Emscripten SDK. It still needs some additional tools next to Clang, so it sits somewhere between "pure Clang" and "full Emscripten SDK".

Alas, although there is WebAssembly support in the original dos-like, it is still not supported in the bindings for Rust. It would require a Rust toolchain to integrate with WAjic, which I am pretty much unfamiliar with. If you have any idea on how to achieve this, I would love to know.

[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!