Emscripten Moves to GitHub

After starting on Google Code, and later adding a git mirror, Emscripten has now moved entirely to GitHub. emscripten.org and so forth should now forward to there.

The main reason for the change is the inconvenience in maintaining two clones. hg-git helped greatly, but it remained a constant hassle. Meanwhile GitHub has been getting more popular and more useful. The last straw was GitHub's recent addition of a much nicer issue tracker. So I decided to make the move today, which coincides nicely with the release of Emscripten 1.0: A fresh start on the road ahead to 2.0.

Code will not be updated in the Google Code page anymore, and I pushed a final commit there to warn people they are running old code if they get there by mistake. I moved the important wiki pages to GitHub, which leaves only one thing left behind, the open issues. If you have an open issue on Google Code that you care about, please either open a new issue on GitHub for it, or tell me and I'll do it for you.

Emscripten 1.0!

It's been almost a year since I started Emscripten (which, if you haven't heard of it, is a tool to compile LLVM to JavaScript), during which it took up much of my spare time. So I am very pleased to announce that today Emscripten has reached the 1.0 milestone. This release comes with a demo of rendering PDFs on the web (warning: that page downloads >12MB, since it includes Poppler and FreeType. It's like downloading an entire desktop app, almost).

Other highlights in this release:

• Very significant optimization of memory use in the compiler. This was necessary for the PDF demo to build, since it is far larger than previous demos.
• Full support for the recently released LLVM 2.9.
• The Emscripten documentation paper is finished. It explains how Emscripten works, so you might be interested in it if you care what Emscripten does under the hood (but if you just want to use Emscripten you don't need to read it).

Overall Emscripten is now in very good shape. It can probably compile most any C/C++ project out there, subject to some limitations (like JS not allowing C-style multithreading). At times some manual intervention is needed, like changing the project's settings so it doesn't generate inline assembly, and of course bugs probably still exist, but recently the code I have compiled has tended to just work (hence the rate of commits has greatly decreased recently).

The speed of the generated code can be quite good. By default Emscripten compiles with very conservative settings, so the code will be slow, but optimizing the code is not that hard to do. Optimized code tends to run around 10x slower than gcc -O3, which is obviously not great, but on the other hand fairly decent and more than good enough for many purposes. And of course, that ratio will improve along with advancements in JavaScript engines, LLVM, and the Closure Compiler.

So, Emscripten 1.0 is in my opinion pretty solid. There are no major outstanding bugs, and no major missing features. (But I do have plans for some major improvements, which are difficult, but should end up with code that runs at least twice as fast.) Now that Emscripten is at 1.0, I am hoping to see it used in more places. I'm starting to propose at Mozilla that we use it in various ways, and also I'd love to see things like GTK or Qt ported to the web - if anyone wants to collaborate on that, let me know.