On Saturday, 29 October 2016 at 21:46:37 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
Any thoughts on how much work is involved to port the runtime?
And what other changes might be involved? The chap that used
the C backend for LLVM wrote a little mini runtime but I guess
didn't have to worry about the version blocks in the compiler
front end as much. (don't recall what architecture he
pretended to be compiling to).
Glibc has obviously already been ported to run in browser by
emscripten.
I have actually meant something quite different - implementing
new backend for DMD which emits wasm directly (possibly by
embedding binaryen). That is more work than simply using LLVM
stack as-is but would result in unique marketing advantage -
existing pipeline of C -> Emscripten -> asm.js -> asm2wasm is
rather annoying. And native wasm backend for LLVM is in
development for quite a while now with no clear ETA.
At the same time intended wasm spec
(https://github.com/WebAssembly/design) is much more simple than
machine code for something like x86_64. If Walter gets
interested, that may be a feasible path :)
