I presume this will improve performance. Also, if I've understood
correctly, WASM-based compiled web code is capable of automatically
growing its memory, which the previous asm.js build of the puzzles
could not do, and occasionally caused people to complain that if they
tried to play a _really big_ game in their browser, the JS would
eventually freeze because the emulated memory ran out.
I've been putting off doing this for ages because my previous
Emscripten build setup was so finicky that I didn't like to meddle
with it. But now that the new cmake system in this source tree makes
things generally easier, and particularly since I've just found out
that the up-to-date Emscripten is available as a Docker image (namely
"emscripten/emsdk"), this seemed like a good moment to give it a try.
The source and build changes required for this update weren't too
onerous. I was half expecting a huge API upheaval, and indeed there
was _some_ change, but very little:
- in the JS initPuzzle function, move the call to Module.callMain()
into Module.onRuntimeInitialized instead of doing it at the top
level, because New Emscripten's .js output likes to load the
accompanying .wasm file asynchronously, so you can't call the WASM
main() until it actually exists.
- in the JS-side library code, replace all uses of Emscripten's
Pointer_stringify() function with the new name UTF8ToString(). (The
new version also has an ASCIIToString(), so I guess the reason for
the name change is that now you get to choose which character set
you meant. I need to use UTF-8, so that the × and ÷ signs in Keen
will work.)
- set EXTRA_EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS=[cwrap,callMain] on the emcc
link command line, otherwise they aren't available for my JS setup
code to call.
- (removed -s ASM_JS=1 from the link options, though I'm not actually
sure it made any difference one way or the other in the new WASM
world)
- be prepared for a set of .wasm files to show up as build products
alongside the .js ones.
- stop building with -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release! I'm not sure why
that was needed, but if I leave that flag on my cmake command line,
the output .js file fails to embed my emccpre.js, so the initial
call to initPuzzle() fails from the HTML wrapper page, meaning
nothing at all happens.
This completely removes the old system of mkfiles.pl + Recipe + .R
files that I used to manage the various per-platform makefiles and
other build scripts in this code base. In its place is a
CMakeLists.txt setup, which is still able to compile for Linux,
Windows, MacOS, NestedVM and Emscripten.
The main reason for doing this is because mkfiles.pl was a horrible
pile of unmaintainable cruft. It was hard to keep up to date (e.g.
didn't reliably support the latest Visual Studio project files); it
was so specific to me that nobody else could maintain it (or was even
interested in trying, and who can blame them?), and it wasn't even
easy to _use_ if you weren't me. And it didn't even produce very good
makefiles.
In fact I've been wanting to hurl mkfiles.pl in the bin for years, but
was blocked by CMake not quite being able to support my clang-cl based
system for cross-compiling for Windows on Linux. But CMake 3.20 was
released this month and fixes the last bug in that area (it had to do
with preprocessing of .rc files), so now I'm unblocked!
CMake is not perfect, but it's better at mkfiles.pl's job than
mkfiles.pl was, and it has the great advantage that lots of other
people already know about it.
Other advantages of the CMake system:
- Easier to build with. At least for the big three platforms, it's
possible to write down a list of build commands that's actually the
same everywhere ("cmake ." followed by "cmake --build ."). There's
endless scope for making your end-user cmake commands more fancy
than that, for various advantages, but very few people _have_ to.
- Less effort required to add a new puzzle. You just add a puzzle()
statement to the top-level CMakeLists.txt, instead of needing to
remember eight separate fiddly things to put in the .R file. (Look
at the reduction in CHECKLST.txt!)
- The 'unfinished' subdirectory is now _built_ unconditionally, even
if the things in it don't go into the 'make install' target. So
they won't bit-rot in future.
- Unix build: unified the old icons makefile with the main build, so
that each puzzle builds without an icon, runs to build its icon,
then relinks with it.
- Windows build: far easier to switch back and forth between debug
and release than with the old makefiles.
- MacOS build: CMake has its own .dmg generator, which is surely
better thought out than my ten-line bodge.
- net reduction in the number of lines of code in the code base. In
fact, that's still true _even_ if you don't count the deletion of
mkfiles.pl itself - that script didn't even have the virtue of
allowing everything else to be done exceptionally concisely.
