Emscripten 1.5!

Version 1.5 of Emscripten, the LLVM to JavaScript compiler, is out. Lots of new stuff:

• A Text-to-Speech demo using eSpeak. Not much had to be done to get this to work, a few library functions were missing but that is pretty much it. I did need to bundle getopt and strtok C sources in the project though. Also, I had to use typed arrays type 2, since the eSpeak source code is not as platform independent as we would like (so this ended up being a good test of typed arrays 2 actually). For more details, source code etc., see the demo page.
  
• max99x has written a nice Filesystem API. See that link for documentation. It makes the emulated filesystem much more flexible and useful. The text-to-speech demo uses it, as do all the automatic tests. Aside from the API itself, this update comes with a ton of library additions for IO related things.
  
• max99x also wrote parsing code to detect field names in LLVM metadata. This lets you use the original C/C++ field names in your JavaScript, so integrating compiled code and JavaScript becomes much easier. I am thinking about extending this for use in the bindings generator.
• Speaking of the bindings generator, it has seen a lot of work and things are finally starting to run with Bullet, at least a 'hello world' of creating a btVector3. There is still some work ahead before it is finished, not sure how much.

Emscripten 1.4!

Version 1.4 of Emscripten, the open source LLVM to JavaScript compiler, has been released.

Some significant improvements this time, including

• Support for compiling and loading dynamic libraries, thanks to max99x for writing this very useful (and not easy to write!) feature. You can now compile a module as a shared library, and load it from your main compiled script just like you would load a normal shared library in native code, using dlopen() and so forth. This can potentially be very useful, both in not needing to rewrite code that is already split up into modules, and also in that it lets you load the main module quickly since other stuff is split out into other files, which can be loaded later on demand. I hope to see a demo of this up soon.
  
  
• Automatic bindings generation. Until now, you could compile a C or C++ library and run it on the web, but using it from normal JavaScript was clunky. Thankfully bretthart pointed me to CppHeaderParser, a pure Python C++ header parser, which Emscripten can now use to generate bindings (for more details on the header parser, see here). The result is a set of JavaScript objects that wrap the compiled C++ code, so you can write quite natural JavaScript code to access them, for example, var inst = new CppClass() to create an instance, inst.doSomething() to call a function, etc. A lot of basic stuff already works (see part 2 of test_scriptaclass), I am currently investigating the use of this with Bullet in ammo.js, hopefully I will succeed there and have a more detailed blogpost afterwards.
  
  
• Library stuff, lots of fixes and additions there, thanks to max99x and timdawborn.