Hello,

Thanks to the efforts of Nikolay Nikolov, the FPC compiler can now recompile itself to webassembly (the support for the goto statement made this possible).

As a consequence, this means FPC can now be run in a browser. See the screenshot at

https://wiki.freepascal.org/WebAssembly#Running_in_Web_Browsers

There are still some steps to do before FPC will actually compile and link a program, but this is in the works as well.

If you think this is just a cute geeky achievement, it is not.

Think about the possibilities: being able to work without the need for an installation. Just go to a webpage and start developing as you would on your desktop.

For teaching programming, a teacher does not need to provide anything except a browser and still have all the possibilities he would have when using a desktop.
No heavy server infrastructure is needed, everything happens in the browser.

No doubt, other possibilities will come to mind.

Stay tuned for more goodies from the FPC team :-)

Michael.

How big is the difference in performance? I guess it is very big. Ten-fold maybe?

You are right, for teaching programming this is a perfect tool.

Juha
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Thanks to the efforts of Nikolay Nikolov, the FPC compiler can now recompile itself to webassembly (the support for the goto statement made this possible). As a consequence, this means FPC can now be run in a browser.

Incredible!

El dom, 22 oct 2023 a las 17:52, Bart via lazarus
() escribi?:

This is amazing. Congratulations to all of you. Thank you!

Gustavo

Juha Manninen wrote

How big is the difference in performance? I guess it is very big. Ten-fold maybe?

I doubt that it will be so much. Webassembly engines are highly optimized.

But compilation with the webassembly binary still needs some work before we can do benchmarking.

Michael.

Thanks to the efforts of Nikolay Nikolov, the FPC compiler can now recompile itself to webassembly (the support for the goto statement made this possible). As a consequence, this means FPC can now be run in a browser.

Very nice. Thank you to all who worked on this.