Is there a way I can create a virtual instance of gcc compiler on the client browser when the client opens my website??
By doing so, I can directly pass the user .c file as argument to my compiler instance and then execute it without having to make a POST call to server and execute the file there???
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A:
Originally I userstood your question to be targeting the native platform on which the browser is running:
Consider that Browsers may be running on many different platforms, operatinng systems and processor architectures. Compiling C in the way you describe might be technically doable, but practically infeasible.
I was basing "practically infeasible" on the difficulty of supporting the plethora of widely used browser platforms.
Now I understand that you are thinking more on the lines of targeting a virtual environment. I'll amend practically infeasible to "a large amount of work".
If I understand your intent it is to run a C compiler which emits, shall we say, x86 compiled code and executes it. So to do that we need an emulation of the x86 environment in, say, JavaScript. What's more I think your intent is that the conmpiler itself execute in this environment, so that you can re-use gcc. So you'll need to emulate a file-system too. It's "obvious" that this could be done, but it really is a lot of work. Is it really worth it?
Competition code is small (I guess) even with lots of programmers the number of simultaneous compiles can't be so huge with a decent queued request system, a touch of Ajax, and a bit of back-end scaling how costly is it to support the expected population? What's the ratio of developers to back end systems?
Anyway, if I were to address this problem I'd go for taking the code for an opensource browser and melding in the gcc code. Produce a compiler/browser hybrid. Give that to the developers and tell them "Use this and get zippy compilation speeds, or use your own browser and join the queue."
djna
2010-07-26 06:39:08
Of course you don't make a native binary for the local machine. You compile the C to run on a virtual machine written in javascript. Of course writing a C compiler in javascript will be a bit of work.. :-)
R..
2010-07-26 06:42:00
An alternative (much easier but slower) would be writing a x86 virtual machine in javascript and running gcc on that...
R..
2010-07-26 06:43:14
+1 - I like the deduction practically infeasible.
Praveen S
2010-07-26 06:43:21
@djna :-Why is it practically infeasible??i guess you didn't get the whole idea of what i am trying to do.
Silver Spoon
2010-07-26 06:43:23
Can i create an instance of my gcc compiler and send it to the client at the time of loading.
Silver Spoon
2010-07-26 06:45:17
@Silver Spoon - I was a tad hasty, amended my answer.
djna
2010-07-26 07:40:19
@djna :- "Anyway, if I were to address this problem I'd go for taking the code for an opensource browser and melding in the gcc code. Produce a compiler/browser hybrid. Give that to the developers and tell them "Use this and get zippy compilation speeds, or use your own browser and join the queue."...........Can you elaborate on this a little bit...I am unable to understand that.
Silver Spoon
2010-07-26 14:09:35
@djna :- And I dnt really need to emulate my file system the way i am thinking about it now...I might be wrong. Can you elaborate a little bit on the need to emulate the file system.
Silver Spoon
2010-07-26 14:11:17
File-systems: compilation will reference headers, need to read files. Browser may not permit access to native file system, or it might use different file naming conventions. Your own browser: If the browser includes the gcc code it's running natively on the developer's machine, no limits to what it can do. No need to virtualise anything.
djna
2010-07-26 15:24:45
GCC running on an emulator running as javascript or on a JVM in a browser is going to be very painful for all but very small C source files. I'd bet that the memory usage of this would be sky high and the garbage collection would rarely know that it could free memory.
nategoose
2010-07-26 20:46:03
A:
You're not going to use GCC as it is written for this. AT BEST, you could accomplish something simalar if you had a compiler written in Java that targeted the JVM and could be ran as an applet. I don't know what it would take to get something like this working but, I suspect it would take a bit work to get it up and going. As far as I know nothing currently exist that does this.
NoMoreZealots
2010-07-26 18:08:33