WebAssembly (Wasm) support in Musl

[Nicholas Wilson <nicholas.wilson@realvnc.com>]

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

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Nick Wilson
RealVNC Ltd