Wasmer clang in browser

Languages and libraries

c compiler

SHOW HN2024

174points
71comments
#463of 3,515 in 2024
Top 14%of 2024 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

2 positive, 18 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 8 critical, out of 29 comments about the project. Thread score -0.18.

Execution: 2 for, 3 againstPerformance: 0 for, 4 againstIdea: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Impressive that Clang runs in WebAssembly

    From 2 comments
    • Very cool! I've been watching the "toolchains in Wasm" landscape for a while, and seeing a Clang/LLVM toolchain running in Wasm is awesome! YoWASP has also had an LLVM toolchain…
      kylewlacy on HN
    • A few weeks ago, I tried to compile Clang to WebAssembly, but got several different errors, and tried fixing a lot of them, but some of them seemed kind of impossible to fix, so…
      ancientstraits on HN

Objections

  • About 100MB download is too large

    From 3 comments
    • 100MB on every page refresh just to compile C is a pretty bold direction to go in.
      CyberDildonics on HN
    • > note: it requires a 100MB download Is this how big a clang toolchain usually is?
      Retr0id on HN
    • I don’t want my cache requirements ballooning by 100mb.
      adastra22 on HN
  • Performance overhead not discussed

    From 1 comment
    • It's pretty misleading not to mention the performance overhead. That's an obvious downside and quite easy to benchmark. Skipping any discussion of performance feels like sweeping…
      egnehots on HN
  • Runtime support limited to WASIX

    From 1 comment
    • Very cool! I've been watching the "toolchains in Wasm" landscape for a while, and seeing a Clang/LLVM toolchain running in Wasm is awesome! YoWASP has also had an LLVM toolchain…
      kylewlacy on HN

Requests

  • Smaller toolchain size

    From 2 comments
    • The whole LLVM toolchain is a bit big. I think we can reduce much more the size. We actually researched on using tcc but unfortunately tcc doesn’t have a wasm backend (for…
      syrusakbary on HN
    • The Clang WASI SDK weights about 100Mb compressed. We optimized things a bit but still have a way to go (we are not yet compressing in the network). I believe we can serve…
      syrusakbary on HN
  • Wider WASIX runtime adoption

    From 1 comment
    • Very cool! I've been watching the "toolchains in Wasm" landscape for a while, and seeing a Clang/LLVM toolchain running in Wasm is awesome! YoWASP has also had an LLVM toolchain…
      kylewlacy on HN

Questions

Alternatives named

  • tcc

    From 1 comment
    • Couldn’t a tcc or similarly simple C compiler be used instead of a 100MB Clang? Where’s the C to wasm compiler hiding?
      marmaduke on HN
  • WebVM

    From 1 comment
    • GCC? That's easy! :-) What about a complete system? https://webvm.io Shameless plug: we are hosting a WebVM Hackathon next week (11-14 October) over Discord. For more…
      apignotti on HN
  • emception

    From 1 comment
  • YoWASP LLVM

    From 1 comment
    • Very cool! I've been watching the "toolchains in Wasm" landscape for a while, and seeing a Clang/LLVM toolchain running in Wasm is awesome! YoWASP has also had an LLVM toolchain…
      kylewlacy on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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