The committee overseeing the development of the GCC compiler collection (GCC Steering Committee) has approved the inclusion of a WebAssembly backend into the GCC codebase. This decision concerns the general approval of the delivery of the WebAssembly backend as part of GCC. The issues regarding the approval of implementation and acceptance of the submitted code will be separately addressed by the review team.
The backend will allow the use of GCC to compile source code in C/C++ to WebAssembly intermediate code. Compilation to WebAssembly can be utilized for integration with JavaScript projects, execution in web browsers, usage in Node.js, or for creating standalone cross-platform applications running with a WASM runtime. The backend serves as a code generator, utilizing intermediate code produced by GCC's frontends, which parse source code in supported programming languages and provide specific optimizations.
The proposed implementation for inclusion in GCC utilizes external dependencies such as the wabt toolkit, libc implementation for WebAssembly (wasi-libc), and the wasm-ld linker. Not all planned functionality has been implemented; for example, support for debugging information, reference types, tables, exceptions, structuring, and setjump/longjump operations is absent.
Source: opennet.ru
