The Start Of WebAssembly Support Lands In LLVM

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 6 July 2015 at 09:40 AM EDT. 8 Comments
LLVM
As mentioned in this week's LLVM Weekly, the initial WebAssembly back-end was committed to the mainline LLVM code-base but it is not yet functional.

The initial code for targeting WebAssembly landed in the LLVM code-base last week. As covered previously in WebAssembly LLVM Backend Being Discussed, those working on this virtual ISA for web-browsers will be developing this LLVM back-end incrementally within the tree. So the initial code is in there now, but it could be a while before it's useful for developers -- not to mention that no released browsers yet support WebAssembly.

WebAssembly is the joint effort by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple for providing a cross-browser, low-level programming language for in-browser, client-side scripting. WebAssembly comes down to a virtual ISA designed to be faster than JavaScript. The LLVM support would allow writing code in a higher-level language with a LLVM/Clang front-end and to then compile it for the WASM web target.
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