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Alon Zakai edited this page May 30, 2013 · 162 revisions

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Emscripten is an LLVM to JavaScript compiler. It takes LLVM bitcode (which can be generated from C/C++ using Clang, or any other language that can be converted into LLVM bitcode) and compiles that into JavaScript, which can be run on the web (or anywhere else JavaScript can run).

Using Emscripten, you can

  • Compile C and C++ code into JavaScript and run that on the web
  • Run code in languages like Python as well, by compiling CPython from C to JavaScript and interpreting code in that on the web

Ready to get started? Check out the Tutorial!

Demos

Games and Game Engines

WIP

Application Frameworks

  • Qt - Ports of various Qt demos.

Utilities

Programming Languages

Graphics

Other Examples

  • zpipe - zlib compiled to JS
  • zee.js - Another port of zlib to JS (focused on compressing/decompressing of gzip files)
  • lzma.js - LZMA ported to JS
  • sql.js - SQLite ported to JS

Getting Started

Technical Documentation

Get in Touch

Bug Reports

You can file issues here on GitHub. If relevant, please supply the original source, the generated .ll, and the generated .js files (in a gist, pastebin, or any other method). It's very helpful to compile with EMCC_DEBUG=1 in the environment, and grab the /tmp/emscripten_temp/emcc-* files (note - you should empty that directory manually before, so it only contains new content), that will include the bitcode, ll, and JS in several stages.

Contributing

Anyone is welcome to join us in developing Emscripten. Feel free to contact us on IRC or on the mailing list (links above), or through issues here on GitHub.

Patches should be submitted as pull requests. When submitting patches, please:

  • Add yourself to the AUTHORS file (if you aren't already there). By adding yourself, you agree to license your code under the project's open source licenses (MIT/LLVM).
  • You should run all the automatic tests and make sure they pass (python tests/runner.py). Patches that are simple enough (for example, just add library functions that were not used before) might not need this, but most will. Please mention in the pull request or issue which tests you ran.
  • Please make your pull request to incoming, not master. Code in incoming will have tests run on it, and will later merge to master when they all pass.
  • If you add any new functionality or fix an existing bug, add an automatic test to tests/runner.py.
  • Please do not include merge commits in pull requests; include only commits with the new relevant code.

Code Reviews

Current status: In general, kripken should review pull requests before merging. Exceptions are subprojects that are 'owned' by other people (so they should just push to incoming directly):

  • OpenAL and audio in general: @ehsan
  • embind: @imvu
  • Windows stuff: @juj

Active Bounties

Cinder (libcinder.org) - Forum Post

Branches of interest

  • master - Always safe to pull from, the test suite always passes on it
  • incoming - Where new code lands before tests have been done
  • llvmsvn - Where work to support a new version of LLVM lands. Activity typically begins near the end of an LLVM 6-month dev cycle. When LLVM launches the new version, we merge this branch to master and incoming, at which point our support officially moves to that new LLVM version (we only support one at a time)

Unit test suite

Emscripten contains a built-in unit testing facility. A server farm performs continuous testing on the codebase on Windows 8, Ubuntu 12.10 and Mac OSX 10.7.4 systems. See the latest build results in real-time at Emscripten buildbot page. The following targets exist:

  • incoming branch: win-emcc-incoming-tests, ubuntu-emcc-incoming-tests, osx-emcc-incoming-tests.
  • master branch: win-emcc-master-tests, ubuntu-emcc-master-tests, osx-emcc-master-tests.
  • The target win-emcc-incoming-code-test tests the compilation and deployment of a few simple WebGL applications.

The unit tests are run immediately after a commit occurs on incoming or master branches. Reports are logged live to IRC at #emscripten on the Mozilla network.

The OSX and Ubuntu buildbots also run the Emscripten benchmarks after the unit tests (The benchmarks are not supported on Windows at the moment, #729).

Not all tests necessarily pass on all platforms even if the buildbots report "green" status. Some long-standing failing tests have been disabled to be able to focus on new regressions better. To track the current state of recognized failing tests, see the Emscripten bug tracker with label tests.