Writing code for multiple platforms can be a lot of work. It can be even more work to have to completely rewrite it for each one, too. What if you wrote an application in C++, but wanted it to be displayed in the browser somehow? Well now, with a tool called Emscripten, that’s possible.

Emscripten is an LLVM based project that compiles C and C++ into highly performant JavaScript in the asm.js format. In short: near native speeds, using C and C++, inside of the browser. Even better, Emscripten converts OpenGL, a desktop graphics API, into WebGL, which is the web variant of that API.

I previously wrote a blog post illustrating what Emscripten is, and how it works in relation to some of my favorite game development tools: Unreal Engine 4 and Unity. Therefore, I won’t go into great detail about how it works here, but instead wanted to focus on creating your own web project which takes advantage of Emscripten, so that you can take C/C++ code and get it running inside of the browser.

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Platforms

I’m doing this on Windows 10, but the process is the same for the Unix based platforms, OS X and Linux. The only real change you’ll need to make at this point is in the way you enter your code into the command line / terminal. For Windows, I simply write emcc. For Unix based environments, you must prefix your calls with ./ , so your command would read: ./emcc

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Source: SitePoint