Emscripten, Now With More Clang

Emscripten can now work with Clang. It turns out that the llvm bitcode that Clang generates is slightly different from that of llvm-gcc, which uncovered various minor bugs and missing elements in Emscripten (for example, the 'phi' command).

All the tests now pass both llvm-gcc and Clang, and with both optimization and relooping on (however, relooping has been weakened, due to some bugs that were discovered).

The benefits of allowing Clang to be used is that having two sources of LLVM bitcode is better than one - more chances to catch bugs (but even more important would be to add non-C/C++ sources of LLVM bitcode as well!). Another benefit is that Clang is simpler to build so it will allow more people to play with Emscripten.

The wiki has been updated with full instructions, so you can get Clang and try it out with Emscripten right now.

CubeScript on the Web

Emscripten 0.2 is out, and here's a silly demo: the CubeScript engine from Sauerbraten, compiled from C++ to JavaScript, and running in a web page. Finally, you can use a script language on the web ;P

A few more details about the demo appear on that page. Other details about the 0.2 release are in the changelog.

After successfully compiling the CubeScript engine (which was mainly to see if Emscripten could do it - fixed a lot of bugs on the way), I think most C/C++ stuff should work (but there are probably a lot of minor corner cases left). The next steps are something like this:

• Version 0.3: Optimize the compiler for speed. Right now compiling CubeScript, about 2,500 lines of code, takes a minute on my (slow) laptop. The goal is to compile large projects, so this needs to be much faster.
• Version 0.4: Optimize the generated code for speed. Some radical solutions for making it faster are possible, but might take a lot of time, so maybe post-1.0. But some straightforward optimizations should be done in the near future.
  
• Version 0.5: Tools and integration. Make it easy to build multi-file projects, and to connect the generated code to web JavaScript (calling functions both ways).
• ???
• 1.0!