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emscripten-core
emscripten
C++2011–2026
emscripten-core / emscripten

emscripten

Emscripten: An LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler

Languages & CompilersWeb Development
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
123Distinct people
148Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
27.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Emscripten: An LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year148 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-04-16 12:05:53 UTC to 2026-06-13 18:10:02 UTC.

051015202011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 3 submissions, 10 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 20 mentions; 4 submissions, 16 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 0 submissions, 21 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 1 submissions, 12 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 2 submissions, 14 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 1 submissions, 16 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13310
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC20416
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21021
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13112
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16214
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17116
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

13 sources
beagle3·Nov 3, 2014
You seem to have your concepts mixed. asm.js is a compiler that produces portable standard JavaScript output, like CoffeeScript or Elm or ClojureScript, except that its source language is C or C++. The output works on any browser supporting JavaScript, including Chrome and IE. It works very well on Chrome and Mozilla (haven't tried IE recently - old IEs would be slow due to missing TypedArrays and friends, but it would still work). Yes, the created JavaScript is annotated in a way that Mozilla uses to improve speed (and other browsers can, though they do not yet as far as I know) - but those annotations are still perfectly standard JavaScript that even the oldest IE is not confused by. The main use that I'm familiar with for asm.js is to make use of an existing C/C++ codebase. See e.g. all of https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Por
Read the rest
ting-Examples-... and especially the utilities section. Rewriting Poppler, GnuPlot, eSpeak or SQLite in JavaScript is no small undertaking - and asm.js makes this rewrite unneeded. > Unless the barriers to entry for compiling to asm.js can be very significantly reduced, it will become a Mozilla-only ecosystem. While using the asm.js toolchain may not be trivial (or it may be - I last tried it a long, long time ago), it is only the outputs that are meaningful for end users, and those outputs are already compatible with every other browser. The assertion about a Mozilla only ecosystem makes absolutely no sense. > and I think the effort would be better spent on standardizing a spec for a true VM instead of trying to back-compat-hack one into javascript. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. This idea has been aired in some way or another since the early 60s. And yet, every single implementation has failed to deliver on the goals of a "one true VM" (yes, including the CLR, JVM, UCSD p-Code, and tens of other that did gain some traction). The best "true VM" we have today is, surprisingly, x86 and AMD64 bytecode. It has a hardware implementation, which makes it wicked fast compared to all the others - and it is also significantly lower level than any "true VM" proposed to date. Luckily, Mozilla is learning from history and not ignoring it.
In Massive: The asm.js Benchmark
azakai·Oct 30, 2014
There are lots of issues, can take a while to find all the use cases in them (work has been ongoing for some time). But from memory I can recall that https://github.com/johnmccutchan/ecmascript_simd/issues/59 is interesting here, it mentions, among other things, the major SIMD-using code portion from an important real-world codebase (IMVU). Might also be relevant discussion on the emscripten repo, https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%... as some debate happened there while implementing code generation that emits SIMD.js.
In Introducing SIMD.js
drmeister·Sep 25, 2014
I disagree. Clasp could do this because it compiles Common Lisp to LLVM-IR bitcode files (using COMPILE-FILE) as well as directly to native code using LLVM's MCJIT engine (using COMPILE). emscripten (https://github.com/kripken/emscripten) says that it compiles LLVM-IR to JavaScript. I haven't used emscripten, but I believe everything I read on the internet :-) and thus Common Lisp --[Clasp]--> LLVM-IR bitcode files --[emscripten]--> run within browsers.
In Clasp – A Common Lisp with LLVM back end and interoperation with C++
bru·Sep 23, 2014
There are several paths: 1. JS as an assembly language. This is what emscripten[0], a LLVM bytecode-to-JS does, by following the asm.js specification[1]. This is for CPU-intensive tasks, not DOM manipulation. You can use any language that has a LLVM frontend. 2. JS as a target language, from a specific, new language. Those include cleaner variants that keep the same semantics (CoffeeScript, TypeScript, maybe Dart, ...) or more innovative ones, such as Elm[2], which is written in Haskell too. I'd say that a big innovation that makes the life easier is FRP (which is at the heart of Elm or React.js). I fail yet to see what advantages PureScript brings compared to Elm. 0: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten 1: http://asmjs.org 2: http://elm-lang.org/
In PureScript: a statically typed language which compiles to JavaScript
sitkack·Feb 10, 2014
I am no expert but, I'd retarget your platform specific stuff to SDL. AFAIK Emscripten has SDL1 support and SDL2 support is on the way. This would enable your engine to target HTML5 robustly with Emscripten via lua and sdl. Most of your graphics primitives should already be targeting OpenGL ES 2. http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/05/lua-vm-javascript https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/issues/457 https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Roadmap Is your engine open source? I anticipate a JS backend to LuaJIT in the not-too-far future.
In Godot Engine open sourced

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