Friday, October 7, 2011

JSConf.eu, Slides, SQLite on the Web

I got back from JSConf.eu a few days ago. I had never been to JSConf before, and it was very interesting! Lots of talks about important and cool stuff. The location, Berlin, was also very interesting (the mixture of new and old architecture in particular). Overall it was a very intensive two days, and the organizers deserve a ton of credit for running everything smoothly and successfully.

I was invited to give a talk about Emscripten, the LLVM to JavaScript compiler I've been working on as a side project over the last year. Here are my slides from the talk, links to demos are in them. There was also a fourth unplanned demo which isn't in the slides, here is a link to it.

If you've seen the previous Emscripten demos, then some of what I showed had new elements, like the Bullet/ammo.js demo which shows the new bindings generator which lets you use the compiled C++ objects directly from JS in a natural way. One demo was entirely new though, SQLite ported to JS. I haven't had time to do any rigorous testing of the port or to optimize it for speed. However it appears to work properly in all the basic tests I tried: creating tables, doing selects, joins, etc. With WebSQL not moving forward as a web standard, compiling SQLite to JS directly might be the best way to get SQL on the web. The demo is just a proof of concept, but I think it shows the approach is feasible.