[Feature Request] Compiling via Emscripten.
kkimdev opened this issue · 9 comments
It would be great if we can run graal on web using Emscripten
Hi @kkimdev,
We previously implemented a JS back end for Graal and JS specific optimizations that allowed us to AOT compile Java applications (and Truffle language AST interpreters) to the web (see http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2816707.2816715).
However, there are currently no plans to pursue this effort further.
Thanks for the information!
WebAssembly being available could be however be an opportunity to revisit this. We are interested in ideas and thoughts on how this could work in practice (and what limitations would be acceptable). The research paper is a good summary of our experiences when we did early investigations in this direction.
Would be great to have wasm-bindgen-like possibilities in GraalVM
@thomaswue could you please provide a link to that research paper?
one suggestion that might sound Accusatory sorry in advance
why not use WASM in place of LLVM? I've heard that LLVM posses
security threats that WASM doesn't plus you'd get support for go and most
(I'm not sure about plain C) languages you currently support
also i think it was Mozilla that saidone of the reasons they chose to make WASM
because LLVM makes breaking changes at to high speed a rate
to be used as a standard (i know the JVM isn't a standard in the same way as
JavaScript WASM etc is but i think it still applies)
After a bit of a wander through the commit history it looks like there is a new LLVM backend for Graal since this was asked? Which appears to be the simplest route to implementing and maintaining a new JS/WASM backend in the future. https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/substratevm/LLVM-NEW-BACKEND.md
But while an extra layer of indirection via LLVM IR makes for less work here, I'm sure it also inhibits certain optimisations available to the direct-to-javascript approach described in the paper.
@unmellow I may have misunderstood you, but when you talk about e.g. supporting Go I think you're talking about a WASM frontend, whereas this issue is concerned with a JS/WASM backend. That is, "running Graal on WASM" rather than "running WASM on Graal".
@chicoxyzzy I think he was referring to the paper linked by @davleopo.
@eliasvasylenko true i do have a (bad) habit of not creating my own issues when i can
Has this really been "completed" (i.e. done)?
Hi @Zireael07. Sorry for miscommunication, this is not planned at the moment.