WebAssembly (Wasm) support in Musl

WebAssembly (Wasm) support in Musl

[Nicholas Wilson]

Hi,

I'm interested in the plans for WebAssembly support in Musl.

(Background: WebAssembly is a new portable Virtual Machine instruction set, designed for use in browsers to run performance-critical code. It's supported now in all major browsers, and could be a significant part of the web platform in future.)

The Emscripten project has previously used Musl internally, based on a fork, and that's using a quite complicated compiler that performs many legacy pre- and post-processing stages. (I have previously contributed to LLVM and Emscripten, but I'm not affiliated with either project.)

Recently, LLVM/Clang have been working on a brand new & clean compiler target, designed to generate WebAssembly output directly in a clean way, without Emscripten's existing convoluted intermediate steps. The native Clang support for WebAssembly is nearing the point where it's ready to use - at which point it will need a libc!

I'd like to see that added to Musl natively, as part of the upstream release. Is that something that you would be willing to accept patches for?

I've got some patches ready, and apart from adding some new directories ("arch/wasm", "src/internal/wasm") there are hardly any changes at all needed to the core code to get it all compiling for Wasm.

All the best,
Nick

---
Nick Wilson
RealVNC Ltd

Re: WebAssembly (Wasm) support in Musl

[A. Wilcox]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On 27/11/17 13:11, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> I'm interested in the plans for WebAssembly support in Musl.


and just like that, assuming this port is accepted, my opinion of
webassembly goes from 'the worst thing ever invented for computing' to
'maybe only in the top 20 worst things ever invented for computing'.

- --arw


- -- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org
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Re: WebAssembly (Wasm) support in Musl

[Jon Chesterfield]

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I'd like to see closer links between llvm and musl in general. I'm
therefore also interested.

On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 8:27 PM, A. Wilcox <awilfox@adelielinux.org> wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA256
>
> On 27/11/17 13:11, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> > I'm interested in the plans for WebAssembly support in Musl.
>
>
> and just like that, assuming this port is accepted, my opinion of
> webassembly goes from 'the worst thing ever invented for computing' to
> 'maybe only in the top 20 worst things ever invented for computing'.
>
> - --arw
>
>
> - --
> A. Wilcox (awilfox)
> Project Lead, Adélie Linux
> http://adelielinux.org
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Re: WebAssembly (Wasm) support in Musl

[Szabolcs Nagy]

* Nicholas Wilson <nicholas.wilson@realvnc.com> [2017-11-27 19:11:44 +0000]:
> I'm interested in the plans for WebAssembly support in Musl.
> 

i thought there was already support for wasm somewhere,
at least there were some discussions on this list some
time ago.. with a quick search i could find

https://github.com/WebAssembly/musl
(and varius forks of it)

Re: WebAssembly (Wasm) support in Musl

[Nicholas Wilson]

> i thought there was already support for wasm somewhere,
> at least there were some discussions on this list some
> time ago.. with a quick search i could find

> https://github.com/WebAssembly/musl
> (and varius forks of it)

That's a good question!

(I think that particular github repo is a throwaway "experiment".)

The thing that people are actually using currently (including my company) is Emscripten's fork of Musl, which doesn't support the "wasm" target directly, but rather supports asm.js, a precursor to Wasm. Emscripten's fork plays around with Musl the internals quite a bit, and contains a lot of "FIXME" comments, so it's not really quite ready for pushing upstream to you yet.

Given that asm.js is being replaced with wasm, I thought that a fresh start would really be the way to go regarding getting wasm into upstream Musl.

My patches are similar in spirit to what Emscripten has done, but only support wasm (rather than asm.js), and do so natively rather than via the emscripten glue.

With wasm, a lot less glue should be needed, since it's now a pretty "normal" Clang compiler again.

Nick