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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

3 sources
jitl·Oct 30, 2022
It's great that eg asyncify is upstreamed to binaryen/LLVM. My issue with Emscripten is that it's quite challenging to fix bugs in the wrapper Javascript code it generates. I spent a few nights trying to understand how to change the compiler output so I could import the Emscripten result as an ES6 module in both a browser and Node 16+. The way this works is unfortunately 1000s of lines of `if` statements that decide whether or not to concatenate this or that helper into a file, and all the little helper snippets may or may not call into each other. Some of the concatenation is in Python, some of it is in Javascript. I eventually gave up without making any upstreamable progress. Relevant github issue: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/11792 A quote from that thread: > Btw, this issue shouldn't be tagged good-first-bug, b
Read the rest
ecause fixing it will require a substantial overhaul of how Emscripten sets up its imports and organises its startup code. There are several ways it can be accomplished, but it really needs direction from one of the project leads. It doesn't seem like there's any progress here :(
In CoWasm: An alternative to Emscripten, based on Zig (demo: Python in the browser)
scottLobster·Sep 22, 2022
Right, and if that momentum is going to last 20 years, then that's going to dictate what's a good strategic decision and what isn't for the next 20 years. Thanks for letting me know what the good options might be when my infant daughter is halfway through college, that doesn't help me save for it in the meantime. Prior familiarity is a very good reason to pick an option for a greenfield project if you're operating on any type of serious budget (time or money), especially if you need to hire others to help out. There's also the annoying reality that most libraries for new/up-and-coming languages are simply inadequate, despite whatever claims they make. For instance, one of my personal side projects involves getting familiar with WebAssembly (note: not on a serious budget), and I'm using emscripten to transcode because that's what the int
Read the rest
ernet seemed to think was the closest thing to a standard toolkit. I found a bug simply by combining two pieces of example code from Emscripten's own documentation (you'll note I'm transcoding from c++ due to prior familiarity): https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/17143 This is not a dig on emscripten, merely pointing out that it's probably not mature enough for the stress of corporate-scale development, where you encounter all sorts of crazy edge cases well beyond the sample code. Java over the years has obtained that level of maturity. The edge cases are largely solved or at least known, and there's an army of experts and consultants ready to help if there's a problem. When time is money, that matters. It determines the risk profile of any project, greenfield or otherwise. Java's momentum hasn't stopped, at best it's simply slowing. And at this rate it'll take decades to come to a stop, and decades more to recede to any meaningful degree. I'll also point out that C is very much alive and well in the embedded world. Plenty of job postings looking for C experience explicitly, for new products as well as legacy.
In The Reason Java Is Still Popular
flohofwoe·Aug 23, 2022
A proper solution for this problem will also help with the WebGPU API. Mapping a GPU resource returns a JS array view, which currently requires a memcpy-roundtrip into and out of the WASM heap (for instance see here in Emscripten's WebGPU shim: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/37aa752eb...). Ideally the array view could either be mapped directly into the WASM heap, or at least would be accessible from the C/C++/Rust side with a special pointer type (maybe WASM should get a segmented address space like back in the 286 days lol).
In Accessing WebAssembly reference-typed arrays from C++

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