LLVM's Clang Adds Initial Support For WebAssembly

WebAssembly, the low-level programming language for in-browser, client-side scripting that's a joint effort by all leading web browser vendors, continues making progress.

Support for this portable bytecode that's designed to be faster than JavaScript continues being developed within LLVM. The developers from the different browser companies decided to develop an LLVM back-end as the heart of WebAssembly. They've been developing this virtual WebAssembly back-end within the LLVM tree. Now, Clang has initial support for compiling to WebAssembly.

With the latest code as of last week there's initial WebAssembly support in Clang for taking in C/C++ and emitting the WebAssembly bytecode for running within client web-browsers.

Before getting too excited, there's only basic compiling support with not any support yet for assembling or linking a WebAssembly target. The WebAssembly ABI also has yet to be finalized. For what it's worth though, the support is found via this commit to Clang and will be first released in LLVM/Clang 3.8 in H1'2016.