Our great sponsors
-
webr
The statistical language R compiled to WebAssembly via Emscripten, for use in web browsers and Node.
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
A little context: this dive into Fortran is part of the excellent work George has been doing on WebR, to get R running in the browser. The R sources contain a fair bit of Fortran code, and I believe WebR originally used f2c to compile the Fortran to C first, before compiling that to wasm.
With the patches to LLVM Flang, WebR can be built with a real Fortran compiler.
I think George didn't want to say it directly in the blog post, but he has said that he's hoping that Flang would take his patches or implement better ones. That would be a win-win -- these patches wouldn't need to be maintained separately, and since unmodified Flang would be able to compile to wasm, it would benefit other projects out there that use Fortran.
https://docs.r-wasm.org/webr/latest/
https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt/blob/main/wasm2c/README.... is a straightforward way to take an untrusted application (compiled already to wasm) and turn it into C that you can embed into your application or compile to a linkable DLL. I believe this approach has been used to sandbox untrusted libraries in production by Mozilla: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again...