Building Emscripten from Source¶

Building Emscripten yourself is an alternative to getting binaries using the emsdk.

Emscripten’s core codebase, which is in the main “emscripten” repo, does not need to be compiled (it uses Python for most of the scripting that glues together all the tools). What do need to be compiled are LLVM (which in particular provides clang and wasm-ld) and Binaryen. After compiling them, simply edit the .emscripten file to point to the right place for each of those tools (if the file doesn’t exist yet, run emcc for the first time).

Get the main branches, or check the Packaging instructions to identify precise commits in existing releases.

Building LLVM¶

For using the LLVM wasm backend (recommended), simply build normal upstream LLVM from the monorepo. Include clang and wasm-ld (using something like -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS='lld;clang') and the wasm backend (which is included by default; just don’t disable it), following that project’s instructions. For example, something like this can work:

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ../llvm -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS='lld;clang' -DLLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD="host;WebAssembly" -DLLVM_INCLUDE_EXAMPLES=OFF -DLLVM_INCLUDE_TESTS=OFF
cmake --build .

Then point LLVM_ROOT in .emscripten to <llvm_src>/build/bin (no need to install).

Please refer to the upstream docs for more detail.

Building Binaryen¶

See the Binaryen build instructions.