Sunday, July 10, 2011

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.

2 comments:

  1. So does that mean soon python modules can be loaded?

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  2. @Yuguang: The loading code was written by people that want to get exactly that (loading modules in Python) working, so yeah, I expect to see that soon :)

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