Micro C to WebAssembly, Bachelor Project

Bachelor Project at the IT University of Copenhagen, creating a compiler from Micro C to WebAssembly (the new web standard in draft state).

See AboutWebAssembly.md for more information regarding the current (Q1 2017) state of WebAssembly.

Compiling MicroWac

• Run nuget restore with the root of this repository as your working directory (or current directory).
• Run ./micro-wac/pre-build-lexpar-comp.ps1 (or ./micro-wac/pre-build-lexpar-comp.sh on *nix) in order to compile the lexer and parser (this step is also required if you're using VS2015 or later). The pre-build script will not do anything if you already have the latest compiled versions.
  • The script is not baked into the VS build process because of execution policies on PowerShell scripts.
• Run msbuild micro-wac/microwac.fsproj (or xbuild /target:micro-wac on *nix), or simply build the project from within VS. The executable compiler can be run with ./micro-wac/bin/Debug/microwac.exe (or mono micro-wac/bin/Debug/microwac.exe on *nix).

Compiling a MicroC program to WebAssembly with MicroWac

Compile the MicroC program with the microc.exe executable. Run the compiler without any arguments to get information on how to use it.

WebAssembly modules cannot be loaded through the file:// protocol, therefore you need to supply a locally hosted web server in order to see the modules run. I suggest using npm install -g http-server and using the http-server command in the directory of your HTML/WASM files. If you dislike Node (or JS), or like Python better, you can also run a web server in the current directory with Python using the following command: python -m http.server (Python3) or python -m SimpleHTTPServer (Python2).

Once the web server is running, simply access http://localhost:8080/ (or http://localhost:8000) and open the html file of the corresponding WASM sample.

Repository Structure

• micro-wac: contains the source code for the Micro C to WebAssembly Compiler.
• wasm-playground: contains hand-crafted .wast samples, their compiled binaries and, for each, a tiny framework to run them in.
• web-backend: contains the source code for the back-end web server that exposes the compiler via a simple RESTful API. This part of the project was discarded in favor of spending more time on the compiler itself. The code that was created is kept for historical reasons.