webc

README

webc - A lightweight, WASM C99 Compiler

webc is a compiler for C99 that outputs WASM and a JS runtime for both servers and browsers. The goal of webc is to create a runtime similar to native C that can be run either in the browser or on the server (with Node.js, Bun etc.) with features such as a virtual filesystem, C style error handling (errno), and support for signals from JavaScript.

Warning ⚠️: webc is in early alpha so there may be bugs, vulnerabilities, and missing functionality. Use at your own risk

Installation

The only requirements for webc is having Go installed on your system, other than that you can install it with:

git clone https://github.com/grqphical/webc
cd webc
make build

Usage

Simply run the compiler with a C file and it will output a WASM binary as well as an HTML/JS file to run the program

You can use -s to create a server runtime that can be run with Node.JS or a similar JS runtime

You can use the -o flag to change where the output binary will be.

Features/Roadmap

• Main function
• Integer variables, arthimetic, and variable modification
• Floating point variables, arthimetic, and variable modification
• Character variables, arthimetic, and variable modification
• Constant variables
• ++ and -- operators
• Long (64 bit Integer) variables, arthimetic, and variable modification
• Unsigned Integer/Long variables, arthimetic, and variable modification
• If Statements
• Else Statements
• Else If Statements
• For Loops
• While loops
• Functions
• Basic Preprocessor (include, define, ifdef, ifndef)
• Advanced Preprocessor (macros, full if statements, etc.)
• Dynamic Memory (malloc/free)
• Structs, Unions, Typedefs
• Static variables

Development

To build webc for your current platform, run make build

Thanks to Go's ability to cross-compile, you can create builds for other platforms/architectures!

To build every binary for every supported platform, run make build-all

To build a binary for a specific platform, run make build-target OS=os ARCH=arch. If you wanted to build a binary for MacOS on arm64 you would set OS=darwin and ARCH=arm64

To run webc's tests, run make test. webc includes both unit tests and a custom integration test system for testing the output of functions in compiled WASM binaries. This system is inside of the testing/ directory

Contributions

Any contribution is welcome, please make sure to go through the steps below before making a Pull Request:

1. Any new code has tests (if necessary, which 99 times out of 100 it is)
2. Make sure EVERY test passes by running make test
3. Make sure the code is formatted by running make format (this does require gofmt which should come with every Go installation)

You can view the full guidelines in CONTRIBUTING.md

License

webc is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License