At the risk of sounding like a broken record - I've been talking about the
next idea a lot recently ;) - I think this is something wasm2c can help
with. I just gave a talk about how:

http://kripken.github.io/talks/2020/universal.html#/

The idea is that we add a single additional build target, "universal C",
which compiles LLVM and Binaryen to portable C code that can then be
compiled on practically any platform. So this new "build" would be C, and
people would download those C files and run a simple command to build them
locally. After the local build you end up with a normal executable that
just works.

There is still that build step locally, but it's the simplest build
possible - no build system is needed, no special local setup, no cmake or
configure, just run gcc or clang on a self-contained C file. That should be
trivial on ARM64 MacOS or Linux as I believe they have a system C compiler
installed by default.

I'm not opposed to adding "proper" ARM64 builds, though - ARM64 builds
would have some benefits over wasm2c. But wasm2c builds do cover the long
tail of less-common platforms, and we can probably set them up much quicker
too. I hope to do this for Binaryen soon anyhow.

- Alon

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 11:30 AM Brion Vibber <[email protected]> wrote:

> I've been a bit of an ARM64 enthusiast of late, trying out Linux, Windows
> 10, and iOS devices that run on the ARM64/Aarch64 family of processors.
> Emscripten works fine on these machines if one cares to do some light
> development work on them, but since there's no binaries built from CI, the
> standard emsdk can only install by building from source -- which can take
> hours on a middleweight portable machine.
>
> Now that Apple is switching their Mac product line to ARM64 processors
> over the next two years, it will likely become much more common next year
> for people to have ARM64-based laptop and desktop computers, and some of
> them will need to build something with emscripten in their workflows either
> on macOS or on a virtualized Linux in Docker etc.
>
> From what I've seen presented at WWDC, the ARM64 Macs will support
> emulated processes, so it may work to ship the x86_64 binaries with the
> caveat that they will run much slower than native builds.
>
> Virtualized Linux builds would also need native ARM64 binaries to run, or
> else they'd have to sit there for a couple hours compiling after every
> upgrade.
>
> And of course there are already Windows 10 and Linux computers available
> with ARM64 processes, on sale since a couple years ago and used in the wild
> in modest numbers.
>
> I get the impression that the biggest roadblock to explicit ARM64 support
> in emscripten is getting it into the CI infrastructure:
> * Linux/ARM64 builds and testing?
> * macOS/ARM64 builds and testing?
> * Windows/ARM64 builds and testing?
>
> It's too soon to start on macOS since it's in beta, dev kits aren't
> shipped yet, and there's no obvious way yet to figure out how to run tests
> on a macOS ARM system in CI. :)
>
> And I'm less sure how important Win/ARM64 is, given you can use the
> Linux/ARM64 version in WSL virtualization. But some folks prefer to develop
> on native Windows, too.
>
> If there's any way we can start talking about Linux/ARM64 builds and
> testing, I would be very happy about it! I would even kick in a few bucks
> for a VM or something if that would help any. ;)
>
> Thanks for your time and your consideration!
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
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