@qknight I must say... emscripten seems awful requiring all this extra stuff per package. Let me or @ElvishJerricco if you are interested in leveraging the cross stuff and use LLVM directly to try to avoid needing such special-casing.

@Ericson2314 Unfortunately, the wasm backend in LLVM isn't nearly mature enough for most people's use cases. The compiler is fine, but it lacks critical components like libc. I've been getting by without by just porting stuff myself, but it's all very thrown-together and I probably wouldn't recommend it to be anyone's default at the moment. Emscripten is a reasonably production ready toolchain, plus it supports compiling to JS. As much as I dislike Emscripten, I think it'll be here for a while until the wasm story gets more fleshed out as a proper cross target.

That said, I'm not super happy seeing all kinds of special cases for Emscripten in nixpkgs. As a toolchain, Emscripten is really poorly designed.

I mean we could piecemeal rewrite and repackage enscripten, slowly turning things into pain WASM-via-LLVM.

as long as there is no prototype code or even documentation on how to get rid of emscripten i don't see how that should be done.

emscripten works actually pretty well as a standalone and combined with nixpkgs i think it can be automated even futher. that said, over time we can move away from it but there need to be examples working and i don't see any.

@qknight wasm-cross builds C packages with LLVM + musl. It's not perfect but it's much more in line with a proper cross toolchain and works more easily with nixpkgs. EDIT: I would love to steal Emscripten's libc implementation, but that proved rather difficult last time I tried.

@ElvishJerricco so do we have a prototype somewhere?

@qknight What do you mean? wasm-cross is the prototype. To be clear: I'm not suggesting getting rid of Emscripten, or merging wasm-cross into nixpkgs (yet).

@ElvishJerricco can't find wasm-cross in nixpkgs. so this is more of a vision than an actual thing we can do. so when you got something to look at, i'm eager to review it.

in general, don't underestimate the amount of work emscripten does behind the scenes. i've spent at least 3 full weeks (nerd weeks, not employe weeks) in emscripten documentation and examples, talked to several developers while writing fastxmllint.js and nix-instantiate.js.

but i've not yet used WASM but instead asm.js.

@qknight my first comment about wasm-cross was a link. https://github.com/WebGHC/wasm-cross.

in general, don't underestimate the amount of work emscripten does behind the scenes

I don't. And this is exactly why it's terrible. C toolchains should not have so much work to do. wasm-cross certainly doesn't.

@qknight in particular https://github.com/WebGHC/nixpkgs has yet to be merged back. That may be what you are looking for.

@Ericson2314 probably not. The nixpkgs fork just has some miscellaneous things necessary for cross, most of which has been merged upstream (not all). The meat of the wasm work is in wasm-cross.

@ElvishJerricco Well then you need to start leveraging new nixpkgs more :P At least after #36867