[racket] Racket in a browser?

2011/4/10 Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu>:
> Why would it be better to first retarget Racket to the LLVM than to
> just use the current Racket bytecode->JavaScript compiler?

Does the current bytecode to JavaScript compiler cover the whole language?
A direct Racket bytecode to JavaScript compiler ought to be
faster/smaller/better etc.

One advantage with the LLVM solution is that one is sure that the semantics of
the parts of Racket that are implemented in C will be preserved. I am thinking
such things as the numerical tower, whose C implementation contains quite a few
functions that are non-trivial to implement directly in JavaScript.

Another plus is that the effort of using Emscripten is small compared
to the effort of implementing a Scheme runtime in JavaScript.

Here is a Python in a browser demo:
    http://syntensity.com/static/python.html
And here is Lua:
    http://syntensity.com/static/lua.html

-- 
Jens Axel Søgaard


2011/4/10 Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu>:
> Why would it be better to first retarget Racket to the LLVM than to
> just use the current Racket bytecode->JavaScript compiler?
>
> On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Jens Axel Søgaard
> <jensaxel at soegaard.net> wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> An interesting LLVM to JavaScript compiler called Emscripten has just
>> been released.
>>
>>    http://syntensity.blogspot.com/2011/04/emscripten-10.html
>>
>> Maybe this could be used to make Racket-in-browser?
>>
>> Is it feasible to compile the non-jit version of Racket with
>> Emscripten or is there
>> some obvious obstacles?
>>
>> If not the idea is would make a nice Racket project for someone.
>> Say, Project Bracket (=BrowserRacket).
>>
>> It goes without saying, that the solution won't be fast, but it might be
>> fast enough. At least the demo (a pdf-renderer in JavaScript works
>> reasonable fast).
>>
>> --
>> Jens Axel Søgaard
>>
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-- 
--
Jens Axel Søgaard