Emscripten

Emscripten: An LLVM-to-JavaScript Compiler

If you want to work with emcc, emconfigure and emmake as you are used to from Ubuntu and similar distributions,

nix-shell -p emscripten

A few things to note:

export EMCC_DEBUG=2 is nice for debugging
The build artifact cache in ~/.emscripten sometimes creates issues and needs to be removed from time to time

Examples

Let's see two different examples from pkgs/top-level/emscripten-packages.nix:

pkgs.zlib.override
pkgs.buildEmscriptenPackage

A special requirement of the pkgs.buildEmscriptenPackage is the doCheck = true. This means each Emscripten package requires that a checkPhase is implemented.

Use export EMCC_DEBUG=2 from within a phase to get more detailed debug output what is going wrong.
The cache at ~/.emscripten requires to set HOME=$TMPDIR in individual phases. This makes compilation slower but also more deterministic.

Using pkgs.zlib.override {}

This example uses zlib from Nixpkgs, but instead of compiling C to ELF it compiles C to JavaScript since we were using pkgs.zlib.override and changed stdenv to pkgs.emscriptenStdenv.

A few adaptions and hacks were put in place to make it work. One advantage is that when pkgs.zlib is updated, it will automatically update this package as well.

(pkgs.zlib.override {
  stdenv = pkgs.emscriptenStdenv;
}).overrideAttrs
(old: rec {
  buildInputs = old.buildInputs ++ [ pkg-config ];
  # we need to reset this setting!
  env = (old.env or { }) // { NIX_CFLAGS_COMPILE = ""; };
  configurePhase = ''
    # FIXME: Some tests require writing at $HOME
    HOME=$TMPDIR
    runHook preConfigure

    #export EMCC_DEBUG=2
    emconfigure ./configure --prefix=$out --shared

    runHook postConfigure
  '';
  dontStrip = true;
  outputs = [ "out" ];
  buildPhase = ''
    emmake make
  '';
  installPhase = ''
    emmake make install
  '';
  checkPhase = ''
    echo "================= testing zlib using node ================="

    echo "Compiling a custom test"
    set -x
    emcc -O2 -s EMULATE_FUNCTION_POINTER_CASTS=1 test/example.c -DZ_SOLO \
    libz.so.${old.version} -I . -o example.js

    echo "Using node to execute the test"
    ${pkgs.nodejs}/bin/node ./example.js

    set +x
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
      echo "test failed for some reason"
      exit 1;
    else
      echo "it seems to work! very good."
    fi
    echo "================= /testing zlib using node ================="
  '';

  postPatch = pkgs.lib.optionalString pkgs.stdenv.isDarwin ''
    substituteInPlace configure \
      --replace-fail '/usr/bin/libtool' 'ar' \
      --replace-fail 'AR="libtool"' 'AR="ar"' \
      --replace-fail 'ARFLAGS="-o"' 'ARFLAGS="-r"'
  '';
})

Using pkgs.buildEmscriptenPackage {}

This xmlmirror example features an Emscripten package that is defined completely from this context and no pkgs.zlib.override is used.

pkgs.buildEmscriptenPackage rec {
  name = "xmlmirror";

  buildInputs = [ pkg-config autoconf automake libtool gnumake libxml2 nodejs openjdk json_c ];
  nativeBuildInputs = [ pkg-config zlib ];

  src = pkgs.fetchgit {
    url = "https://gitlab.com/odfplugfest/xmlmirror.git";
    rev = "4fd7e86f7c9526b8f4c1733e5c8b45175860a8fd";
    hash = "sha256-i+QgY+5PYVg5pwhzcDnkfXAznBg3e8sWH2jZtixuWsk=";
  };

  configurePhase = ''
    rm -f fastXmlLint.js*
    # a fix for ERROR:root:For asm.js, TOTAL_MEMORY must be a multiple of 16MB, was 234217728
    # https://gitlab.com/odfplugfest/xmlmirror/issues/8
    sed -e "s/TOTAL_MEMORY=234217728/TOTAL_MEMORY=268435456/g" -i Makefile.emEnv
    # https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/issues/6344
    # https://gitlab.com/odfplugfest/xmlmirror/issues/9
    sed -e "s/\$(JSONC_LDFLAGS) \$(ZLIB_LDFLAGS) \$(LIBXML20_LDFLAGS)/\$(JSONC_LDFLAGS) \$(LIBXML20_LDFLAGS) \$(ZLIB_LDFLAGS) /g" -i Makefile.emEnv
    # https://gitlab.com/odfplugfest/xmlmirror/issues/11
    sed -e "s/-o fastXmlLint.js/-s EXTRA_EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS='[\"ccall\", \"cwrap\"]' -o fastXmlLint.js/g" -i Makefile.emEnv
  '';

  buildPhase = ''
    HOME=$TMPDIR
    make -f Makefile.emEnv
  '';

  outputs = [ "out" "doc" ];

  installPhase = ''
    mkdir -p $out/share
    mkdir -p $doc/share/${name}

    cp Demo* $out/share
    cp -R codemirror-5.12 $out/share
    cp fastXmlLint.js* $out/share
    cp *.xsd $out/share
    cp *.js $out/share
    cp *.xhtml $out/share
    cp *.html $out/share
    cp *.json $out/share
    cp *.rng $out/share
    cp README.md $doc/share/${name}
  '';
  checkPhase = ''

  '';
}

Debugging

Use nix-shell -I nixpkgs=/some/dir/nixpkgs -A emscriptenPackages.libz and from there you can go trough the individual steps. This makes it easy to build a good unit test or list the files of the project.

nix-shell -I nixpkgs=/some/dir/nixpkgs -A emscriptenPackages.libz
cd /tmp/
unpackPhase
cd libz-1.2.3
configurePhase
buildPhase
... happy hacking...