Question

Is there 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???

Answer 1

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.”