hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1847.txt

Episode: 1847
Title: HPR1847: Client Side C- WTF Is Wrong With You?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1847/hpr1847.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:04:51

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Hello everybody my name is Sig Poops and you are listening to another edition of Hacker Public Radio.
This episode is entitled Client Side C, WTF is wrong with you.
Well I'll tell you what's wrong with me, it's Client Side C, which is all up in my business right now.
What do you, Client Side C, this sounds crazy, there's an LLVM backend called M.Scriptin that actually produces JavaScript from your C program or your C++ program.
So that's pretty cool, you're porting something written in C or C++ to the client side of JavaScript, the browser running JavaScript.
Some of you may be wondering in addition to how you may be wondering why, that's kind of a complex question, why should we run C on a browser or a non-native code on a browser.
This is my personal opinion, I kind of you see as a universal assembler, I know it's not an assembler but it's everywhere and every architecture has it.
And if we can put this on the browser as well this would be nice, through compiling some compiling mechanism to JavaScript.
And that's exactly what M.Scriptin does, it takes your C code, your C++ code, and as far as I can tell, I don't know if this is the exact mechanism, a composite to something that's very close to, that's closer to JavaScript.
And then that is interpreted by a mechanism commonly known referred to as ASM.js.
And so yeah, you're compiling to a bit of code that's been interpreted on the browser.
So that's pretty cool.
And M.Scriptin wasn't really on my radar until, I don't know if my friend who is organized and I guess maintains this effort to port MAME, that's the arcade machine emulator to JavaScript.
And I was like, we were hanging out and he wanted to see if his page, his main project worked on my telephone.
And I was like, well this seems impossible really to port something in C or C++ to JavaScript.
And that's a huge effort is what that is. And I can't believe you're undertaking it and he's like, well we use M.Scriptin, which I had never heard of.
And I was like, I'm scripting, what is this? And yeah, it's like, yeah, it can compile C and C++ to JavaScript.
So I went home, excited as hell to research what is called M.Scriptin.
And I was like, well I can port my psychogenesis sprite editor to it.
And I had to go with that and it failed miserably because well because my sprite editor has a lot of loops, it's land of the loops my sprite editor.
Every object has a loop to it.
It's a bit much and the fundamental difference between JavaScript and C is in JavaScript you do not have an infinite loop.
You don't have heavy loops, you don't wait basically.
If you have something waiting in the event queue of JavaScript, I'm sorry, it will halt.
And you'll get a message saying this script has stopped working or something like that.
If you're in Firefox, you can message like that.
So instead of writing a main loop, that changes for every GUI object that you're doing or using, I decided to port my intendo emulator over.
It's this intendo emulator I wrote on YouTube a few years ago and it only has one loop, one big loop.
And so that's good, that works for JavaScript.
You can check out my app at feedasilva.com slash web ness.
That's in the show notes.
And there's a guest book in there, sign it with your browser and tell me if it works or not.
So how do you install in scripting? That's a good question.
You go to the inscription wiki, which is in the show notes.
There you'll find how to download and install in scripting.
There's a little something you download for Windows OS X and Linux for the portable SDK that you install.
It'll say for Linux and Mac OS X, you can download the portable in scripting SDK for Linux and OS X.
That's the name of the file, that's in the show notes.
And uncompress that.
You'll get a directory called emsdk underscore portable.
Before you do anything with this, there is a couple things that you need.
You need node, node.js, python, 2.7, I believe, or just python.
And let's see what the dependencies did you need.
I think those are the major dependencies.
Seemake, if you don't have it already.
So go to the directory emsdk underscore portable and run emsdk space update.
Then you run emsdk space install latest.
This is going to take a long time.
You might as well do something that takes a long time, like baking a potato, going to sleep and waking up the next morning, installing Debian.
Something that takes a while.
And once that's done, you type emsdk activate latest.
And then you should be able to do things.
You need to put the proper path.
And so if you source, if you type source, space.slash emsdk underscore env.sh.
That'll set up your path for you.
So you can run emcc, if you want, for the see compiler.
And whatnot.
So now you have the tools.
I'm going to talk about c here, not c++, because I have experience with c.
And I'm scripting.
I don't have any experience running c++.
With them scripting.
So you have everything you need.
Emcc is your compiler, much like gcc.
And it will take c programs.
And then if you specify dash o, something like index.html, it'll generate index.html, which contains the website code, interacts with the DOM, as well as index.js.
And create that as well.
And then index.html.mian, which I believe is the data segment of your program.
So now we need some graphics to draw on that canvas.
I'm scripting comms with sdl.
I'm not sure if it's 1.2 or 2.0, but you can call sdl 1.2 calls.
And that should be run.
You can lock a service right to the pixels manually and unlock a service.
And it will be act pretty, pretty flawlessly and draw whatever you write to the service on the canvas screen.
So that's cool.
You need to have a loop or maybe a stack of loops or something.
You have to have a main loop for something for JavaScript to do.
If you run the function M script and set main loop with the arguments, your function, a number, maybe 10.
This is the microseconds.
And then one, if you're emulating an infinite loop.
The middle number there is what in scripting does is it puts a bit of code in the JavaScript event queue.
That gets run every 10 microseconds.
That's the number that you put in there.
That's right.
That should work for you.
So the Nintendo emulator that I'm running has to detect when you press the power button.
That way it'll stop drawing buzz and go to the emulator main loop.
So how I do that is with a simple command called masmint, which you can give it as an argument.
Some JavaScript code.
Have that return something.
And then deal with that as if it were an integer that you're returning.
And so that's what I do.
I pull, I guess, whether the Nintendo is on or off and run the correct script or the correct parts of the program.
So yeah, I think this is it.
And I hope you have fun with emsdk.
Let me know.
Bye bye.
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