rascal2webassembly

A WebAssembly API written in Rascal MPL.

Setup

To be able to run the API, it should be setup within the Eclipse IDE (http://www.eclipse.org). These instructions describe how to do this.

Setup test suite

Pull the test suite from the repo at https://github.com/WebAssembly/testsuite. The WebAssembly files in this repo seem to be using a different syntax for the memory grow and size instructions, than the syntax specification is. For now, change all occurrences of grow_memory to memory.grow, and all occurrences of current_memory to memory.size. This test suite should be setup as an Eclipse project with the name testsuite to be able to run the test files.

Setup pico project

Pico is a minimal educational programming language (http://pico.vub.ac.be). This API includes a compiler from the Pico language into WebAssembly (in lang::pico2wasm::Pico2Wasm). Additionally, a project including several minimal Pico programs is included in the directory pico. This directory should be setup as an Eclipse project under the name pico, to be able to run the Pico compiler.

Setup Rascal

See https://www.rascal-mpl.org/start/

Running

Several main files are included that evaluate different aspects of the implemented API. Look at these references when building similar applications.

• MainParse - Evaluates parsing of the modules in the test suite
• MainDesugar - Evaluates desugaring the parsed modules
• MainExecution - Parses, desugars, converts to ADT and then runs script files in the test suite
• MainConvert - Converts the modules from concrete to abstract syntax, and then back and again; to evaluate the abstract to concrete conversion.
• MainCompilePico - Compiles the pico/factorial.pico program into WebAssembly and runs it.
• EclipseSupport - Provides some very basic eclipse integration for WebAssembly and the Pico compiler.

WebAssembly

See https://github.com/webassembly

Specification: https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/.
Test suite for evaluation: https://github.com/WebAssembly/testsuite

Rascal

See https://github.com/usethesource/rascal

Features

Implemented features are prefixed with a ✔️.

• ✔️ Concrete Syntax Grammar
• ✔️ Abstract Syntax ADT
• ✔️ Transpiler from Pico to WASM
• ❌ - WebAssembly validator - Abandoned

References

WebAssembly

• Haas, A., Rossberg, A., Schuff, D., Titzer, B. (2017). Bringing the Web up to Speed with WebAssembly
  (Note: Contains a reduced abstract syntax description)
• Rossberg., A. (2016). WebAssembly: high speed at low cost for everyone

Rascal

• Klint, P., van der Storm, T., Vinju, J. (2009). Rascal: a Domain Specific Language for Source Code Analysis and Manipulation
• Klint P., van der Storm, T., Vinju. J. (2010). EASY Meta-Programming with Rascal. Leveraging the Extract-Analyze-SYnthesize Paradigm for Meta-Programming

Related

• Klint, P., Lammel, R., Verhoef, C. Toward an Engineering Discipline for Grammarware
• Prinz, A. Multi-level Language Descriptions
  Describes the levels on which a programming language can be modeled.
• Clark, T., Sammut, P., Willans, J. (2008). Applied Metamodelling: A Foundation for Language Driven Development
  (Chapters 2, 4, 5)

Unrelated

These are papers related to a limited extent.

• Donovan, A., Muth, R., Chen, B. Sehr, D. (2000). PNaCl: Portable Native Client Executables
  Described a preceding technology by Google. Deprecated in favor of WebAssembly.
• Zakai, A. (2013). Emscripten: An LLVM-to-JavaScript Compiler
  Describes the process of transpiling and running existing binary and low-level code in a browser, before the introduction of WebAssembly.