Now all this needs is a simple OS running in a browser, that can edit and compile itself, post the resulting binary onto a WebDAV somewhere, and reload itself from there.

Then it becomes a fully self-sustaining OS that can live forever in a browser.

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 working in Wasm for a while too[1], although it seems like this version solves the subprocess problem by providing an implementation of `posix_spawn` whereas the YoWASP one uses some patches to avoid subprocesses altogether

My biggest question marks around this version are about runtime/platform support. As I understand it, this toolchain uses WASIX, which (AFAICT) works with Wasmer's own runtime and with a browser shim, but with none of the other runtimes. Are there plans to get WASIX more widely adopted across more runtimes, or to get WASIX caught up to the latest WASI standard (preview2)? Or maybe even better, bring the missing features from WASIX to mainline WASI like `posix_spawn`[2]? I'd love to be able to adopt this toolchain, but it doesn't seem like WASIX support has really caught on across the other runtimes

[1]: https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-building-llvm-for-webassemb... [2]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/414

Couldn’t a tcc or similarly simple C compiler be used instead of a 100MB Clang? Where’s the C to wasm compiler hiding?

If what I want is not an executable but a shared library, does this get me anything?

I currently have a use case that uses a server running an emscripten build (using SMODULARIZE and some exports, I suppose it’s not a true dylib)

Is it possible/already existing to have interactive C++ lessons where the user's C++ code is compiled an run client-side in a web page?

Cling (the interactive C++ interpreter) should also compile to WASM.

There's a xeus-cling Jupyter kernel, which supports interactive C++ in notebooks: https://github.com/jupyter-xeus/xeus-cling

There's not yet a JupyterLite (WASM) kernel for C or C++.

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 it under the marketing rug :/

100MB on every page refresh just to compile C is a pretty bold direction to go in.

What's the use case?

"Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." ....

> note: it requires a 100MB download

Is this how big a clang toolchain usually is?