Hey there 🤗, Welcome to my GSoC Journey

This is a series of blogs that I am writing to share my amazing GSoC 22 (Google Summer of Code 2022) Journey with you all.

The Designing of the ASR->WASM Backend

After working towards integration tests for sometime, I tried to work towards the wasm backend #583. Initially, we were hoping to use wasmblr to build our wasm backend. But it turns out that wasmblr did not support generating function bodies programmatically (more details here). Also, wasmblr does not have support for generating wat (WebAssembly Text) Format (more details here). Both of which were critical to us.

So, initially, I built a prototype of the wasm backend using binaryen. Binaryen had its own short-comings. We needed the wasm backend to be small in size, simple to maintain and efficient in performance. Binaryen did not meet the first two of these requirements. Therefore, finally, we implemented a custom wasm backend for LFortran.

This phase was mostly/approximately from 12-04-2022 to 02-05-2022.

The MRs in this phase are as follows:

• !1704
• !1705
• #1
• !1713

That’s all for this blog. Thank you for your time. We continue this series in the next blog.