Re: LuaJIT and WebAssembly
- From: Paul Kaletta <pk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: luajit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2017 19:29:39 +0200
Am 17.04.2017 um 17:43 schrieb Coda Highland:
On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 9:43 AM, Paul Kaletta <pk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi everybody,
I recently learned about WebAssembly/WASM, a bytecode format for web
browsers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly
http://webassembly.org/
The format is suitable as a compilation target for C/C++ compilers, and so
the original Lua already runs in a WASM environment.
https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua
Are there any plans add a WebAssembly target to LuaJIT? I realize that
porting LuaJIT to a new target architecture is quite an undertaking, but I
wanted to inquire whether there is any hope.
Best regards,
Paul
I'm not sure I understand the impetus. WebAssembly is already
JIT-compiled, and you wouldn't have access to the FFI, so what benefit
would LuaJIT derive from such a port?
/s/ Adam
My guess is that WASM is not JIT-compiled, but "statically" compiled to
native machine code. If I understand things correctly, WASM is more
like (a portable variant) of LLVM bit-code and less like Java byte
code. Full translation to target machine code can happen before
execution, there is no tracing JIT compiler involved.
If LuaJIT's fast interpreter was ported to WASM, LuaJIT (the language)
would become available in the browser. I don't know enough about
LuaJIT's trace compiler to asses whether it can be made to emit WASM.
This is why I inquired.
I also don't see why LuaJIT's FFI should not be available. If one can
compile C to WASM, and LuaJIT's interpreter was available in a WASM
version, it should be possible to call C code from LuaJIT programs via
LuaJIT's FFI.
My impetus is this: I'm working on a program, written in C++, that uses
imgui as a gui toolkit. Thanks to asm.js or WebAssembly and WebGL,
programs that use this toolkit can run in the browser (e.g.
http://floooh.github.io/oryol-samples/asmjs/ImGuiDemo.html, this demo
uses asm.js and not WASM, but you get the idea).
I would love to use LuaJIT (the language) as a scripting language in my
program, but so far LuaJIT (the implementation) will not run in the
browser. If I want the same scripting language both in the browser, and
in a "native" environment, I need to go with PUC Lua. I think that
WebAssembly will only become more and more important, especially for
game developers.
Best regards,
Paul
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