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.

NodeJS Testing Infrastructure and Supporting Basic If-Else

This week’s work mostly comprises of the following in the LFortran WASM Backend:

  • basic support for integration_tests using nodejs
  • basic support for if-else statements
  • minor improvements

In this week, a fun/interesting part was to figure out the basic implementation for wasm if-else statements. As per the WebAssembly docs, it seemed that the wasm if-else instruction requires a type/signature. This type/signature consists of the parameter types (the types that would be present on the stack just before the execution of the if-else) and the result types (the types that would be present on the stack just after the execution of the if-else). This type/signature is not readily available in our ASR, and we had two ideas for obtaining this type/signature of the wasm if-else instruction:

  1. Writing a visitor function that would return us the parameter and result types necessary for the wasm if-else instruction.
  2. Using a stack variable in the ASR->WASM Backend that keeps track of the types currently present in the function’s stack. So, just before and after the if-else we can quickly look up the stack variable and get the parameter and result types respectively.

During the basic implementation of if-else, I realized the we might not need the parameter and result types as, in most of the cases, if-else do not consume any value and do not return any value. Thus, an emtpy/epsilon type should also work. So, currently, I implemented the basic version of if-else statements without their type/signature. Hopefully, it works. We will update the implementation, if in case there is any issue in the future.

This phase was mostly/approximately from 25-06-2022 to 01-07-2022.

The MRs during this phase are as follows:

Upcoming Tasks:

  • NodeJS testing for CI: #712, and this comment
  • Improve support for if-else statements

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