Virtual Instance of a C compiler on client browser

Is there开发者_Python百科 a way I can create a virtual instance of gcc compiler on the client browser when the client opens my website??

By doing so, I can directly pass the user .c file as argument to my compiler instance and then execute it without having to make a POST call to server and execute the file there???

Originally I userstood your question to be targeting the native platform on which the browser is running:

Consider that Browsers may be running on many different platforms, operatinng systems and processor architectures. Compiling C in the way you describe might be technically doable, but practically infeasible.

I was basing "practically infeasible" on the difficulty of supporting the plethora of widely used browser platforms.

Now I understand that you are thinking more on the lines of targeting a virtual environment. I'll amend practically infeasible to "a large amount of work".

If I understand your intent it is to run a C compiler which emits, shall we say, x86 compiled code and executes it. So to do that we need an emulation of the x86 environment in, say, JavaScript. What's more I think your intent is that the conmpiler itself execute in this environment, so that you can re-use gcc. So you'll need to emulate a file-system too. It's "obvious" that this could be done, but it really is a lot of work. Is it really worth it?

Competition code is small (I guess) even with lots of programmers the number of simultaneous compiles can't be so huge with a decent queued request system, a touch of Ajax, and a bit of back-end scaling how costly is it to support the expected population? What's the ratio of developers to back end systems?

Anyway, if I were to address this problem I'd go for taking the code for an opensource browser and melding in the gcc code. Produce a compiler/browser hybrid. Give that to the developers and tell them "Use this and get zippy compilation speeds, or use your own browser and join the queue."

You're not going to use GCC as it is written for this. AT BEST, you could accomplish something simalar if you had a compiler written in Java that targeted the JVM and could be ran as an applet. I don't know what it would take to get something like this working but, I suspect it would take a bit work to get it up and going. As far as I know nothing currently exist that does this.

Perhaps using a jsLinux in background? There the making process can run in the virtual machine. Communication could be done by extending the clipboard transfer, perhaps into multiple pipes...

I would be interested in javascript based gcc solutions, too.