Convert javascript code to c code [closed]

Is there any way to convert C code to JavaScript and from JavaScript to C? I found V8 juice which can generate JavaScript-side classes from C++, but it's only one way (C++ to JavaScript).

I'm not looking for a software.


Solution 1:

Very, very tricky --- Javascript is a heavily dynamic language where pretty much everything can be changed at run time: names of variables, functions, types, etc. As such it maps very badly onto C. And that's not even considering eval(), which will let you construct arbitrary chunks of Javascript in strings and run them.

Any Javascript translator would have to be able to cope with such things, which means it would have to translate the Javascript into C at run-time --- which makes it a JIT, which you're already using.

You may want to look at writing C bindings for Javascript instead. These will allow your Javascript code to call out to C code and vice versa. This would allow people to write plugins in C, compile them into .so shared libraries, which you can now load and run from your Javascript code. This means you don't need to translate anything.

Javascript's not my area so I can't recommend any particular mechanism, I'm afraid --- but I'd be very surprised if V8Juice, which you've already found, didn't let you do this.

Solution 2:

There are a few compilers that translate JavaScript and TypeScript to C:

  • QuickJS compiles JavaScript to C using an embedded JavaScript engine. This implementation is fairly complete, unlike the other compilers listed here.
  • ts2c translates JavaScript and TypeScript source code to C, but it only supports a small subset of JavaScript's features.
  • NectarJS compiles a subset of JavaScript to C or WebAssembly.

Similarly, it may be possible to compile some statically-typed JavaScript programs to WebAssembly using AssemblyScript, and then decompile them to C using wasm2c.

Alternatively, it might be possible to compile JavaScript to another language that compiles to C:

  • Compile JavaScript to Python, and then compile Python to C using Cython or RPython. Since these compilers are compatible with a subset of Python, this should allow a subset of JavaScript to be translated to C.
  • Compile JavaScript to Lua using Castl, and then translate the Lua code to C using lua2c.

Solution 3:

Why convert when you can simply embed?

https://code.google.com/p/v8/ "V8 can run standalone, or can be embedded into any C++ application."

Being embedded into a C++ application allows JavaScript to access any system that the C++ application has access to, eliminating the need to convert in the first place. I would limit what is has access to somewhat for security reasons though. Web-browsers are obviously the most prominent form of JavaScript being embedded in a C++ application. As implied by the name, JavaScript is a scripting language, not intended to be compiled into assembly/machine code as is C code.