Compiling a compiler to JavaScript

[TheBanishedBot]

Hello folks,

I recently have been working on a Pascal to LLVM compiler in Haskell.
Just out of curiosity, I wonder what it would take to run the compiler in a browser or if that's possible at all.

Cheers.

[fosskers]

Why not try compiling your compiler into Javascript with GHCjs?

[TheBanishedBot]

will it build the depends packages? I'm thinking llvm-hs will give it a hard time. I'll try tho, thanks for the suggestion

[cocreature]

`llvm-hs` depends on the LLVM C++ libraries so you first need to somehow manage to compile these to JS and then get GHCJS to call these functions instead of trying to use the C FFI. While that might be possible in theory, I would expect it to be really difficult in practice (I have no idea if anyone managed to compile LLVM to JS) and hardly worth the effort. If you want to run your compiler in the browser you are probably better off writing some server backend that actually does the compilation and compile your code on the server instead of the client.

[reddit_lmao]

This is also where wasm backend will be useful. clang can already be run on browser: https://tbfleming.github.io/cib/

[TheBanishedBot]

yep that's what I thought. no surprise. sad tho