[fpc-pascal] WebAssembly Target

[Lukasz Sokol]

Hi,

On 15/03/17 16:58, Karoly Balogh (Charlie/SGR) wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, 12 Mar 2017, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> 
>>> Is there something planned in this matter for FPC?
>>> 
>>> I was reading about the new Firefox making WebAssembly publicly 
>>> available ("On Tuesday Firefox 52 became the first browser to
>>> support WebAssembly
>>> 
>> <https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-releases-firefox-52-the-first-browser-to-support-webassembly/>")
>>>
>> 
[1] .
>> 
>> Karoly Balogh (Charlie/SGR) is working on this, and as far as I
>> know has already some degree of success. There is a bounty for
>> initial webassembly support..
> 
> Well, "degree of success" is relative, I have added WASM target to
> the compiler so it compiles at least. I even made it output 1 single 
> instruction... :)
> 
> It's based largely on gutted JVM codegenerator code, although since 
> WebAssembly itself is still a moving target, many things are still 
> uncertain. There's also the problem, that despite it's name,
> WebAssembly is not really an assembly format, but just a stack based
> bytecode (much like JVM), and the official textual representation is
> not yet accepted, plus the reference compiler LLVM outputs something
> entirely different to the semi-official textual formats. And these
> official textual formats are quite painful for the traditional
> structured compiler layers like FPC has.
> 
> But the LLVM-style output would be good, but it's undocumented, and
> as they say it will go away, and LLVM will output the binary
> bytecode directly... (Which is stupid IMO, but hey, a comittee
> decided, so it must be right.)
> 
> Also, any "assembler" or toolchain is still in its infancy. (I made
> both binaryen and wabt segfault in several funny ways already.) So I
> wouldn't expect fast results with this whole target. But I will keep
> working on it as time allows, so "eventually"... Of course if someone
> thinks he can proceed faster and wants to jump in, it's very
> welcomed.
> 
> It's now committed to the webassembly branch in FPC SVN, the
> compiler itself should build at least as "wasm" target, but don't
> expect much.
> 
> Charlie 


Just because of curiosity: since Firefox  52 apparently boasts (to be the first browser with)
WebAssembly support - 
- i know, i know, just because one vendor claims it, it doesn't mean anything yet - 
-maybe something concrete could be derived from that fact? Even if it's just a 
'how do they do it' style of fact.

(in the press release they say something about Emscripten being the reference implementation, if that helps)

-L.
(rs,ianad)