stisa / nwasm

Experimental wasm backend for nim

NWAsm

Experimenting with a webassembly backend for nim.

This repository is used for documentation, issue tracking, and other misc things. The actual code can be found in a fork of Nim here

Compilation is pretty simple (see Trying out).

Notes

I've been writing some notes on how (I think) nim compiler works and also random thoughts on how to implement the backend.

Trying out

• Clone: git clone -b nwasm --single-branch https://github.com/stisa/Nim nwasm
• cd nwasm
• Compile koch nim c -d:release koch.nim
• Compile a test version with wasm support koch temp -d:debug

If everything goes well, you will find nim_temp inside bin. You can use this to compile to wasm, eg: nim_temp wasm <file.nim> (assuming the "./Nim/bin/" folder is in path) and you will find your wasm file, together with a .html file with some glue code.

Passing -r when compiling will also generate a .js file that will be run with nodejs.

Some files you can run are in tests/wasm.

The glue code and loaders are found in nimwasm.cfg, the idea is to make it similar to the template used for nim doc, allowing users to change it by writing their own nimwasm.cfg in their project root.

Simple things like fizzbuzz can be compiled (minus echo, varargs aren't done yet):

proc log(x:SomeOrdinal) {.header:"glue", importc:"echoInt".}
proc log(x:string) {.header:"glue", importc:"echoString".}

for i in 1..100:
  if i mod 15==0:
    log "FizzBuzz"
  elif i mod 5==0:
    log "Buzz"
  elif i mod 3==0:
    log "Fizz"
  else:
    log i

Testament

Testament support is present!

First do koch temp to get a test compiler. Then:

# build testament
cd .\testament
nim c -d:release testament.nim
# run tests
.\testament.exe --nim:"..\bin\nim_temp.exe" cat wasm
# optional: nice html page with test results
.\testament.exe html

Contributing

This project is very much WIP. Main goal for now is to get all nim basic features to work. The gc implementation should probably only handle arc and orc.

If you would like to contribute to the code generation, first of all, thank you!
If you implement some proc or feature, please also add some (simple) tests in tests/wasm.

If your implementation is particularly complex, please consider also adding an explanation in the notes in this repo or add your own file.

See also the github project for some ideas on what to do.