Emscripten Compiler Settings

The following is a complete list of settings that can be passed to emscripten via -s on the command line. For example -sASSERTIONS or -sASSERTIONS=0. For more details see the emcc documentation.

Unless otherwise noted these settings only apply when linking and have no effect during compilation.

ASSERTIONS

Whether we should add runtime assertions. This affects both JS and how system libraries are built. ASSERTIONS == 2 gives even more runtime checks, that may be very slow. That includes internal dlmalloc assertions, for example.

Default value: 1

STACK_OVERFLOW_CHECK

Chooses what kind of stack smash checks to emit to generated code: Building with ASSERTIONS=1 causes STACK_OVERFLOW_CHECK default to 1. Since ASSERTIONS=1 is the default at -O0, which itself is the default optimization level this means that this setting also effectively defaults 1, absent any other settings:

  • 0: Stack overflows are not checked.

  • 1: Adds a security cookie at the top of the stack, which is checked at end of each tick and at exit (practically zero performance overhead)

  • 2: Same as above, but also runs a binaryen pass which adds a check to all stack pointer assignments. Has a small performance cost.

Default value: 0

CHECK_NULL_WRITES

When STACK_OVERFLOW_CHECK is enabled we also check writes to address zero. This can help detect NULL pointer usage. If you want to skip this extra check (for example, if you want reads from the address zero to always return zero) you can disable this here. This setting has no effect when STACK_OVERFLOW_CHECK is disabled.

Default value: true

VERBOSE

When set to 1, will generate more verbose output during compilation. [general]

Default value: false

INVOKE_RUN

Whether we will run the main() function. Disable if you embed the generated code in your own, and will call main() yourself at the right time (which you can do with Module.callMain(), with an optional parameter of commandline args).

Default value: true

EXIT_RUNTIME

If 0, the runtime is not quit when main() completes (allowing code to run afterwards, for example from the browser main event loop). atexit()s are also not executed, and we can avoid including code for runtime shutdown, like flushing the stdio streams. Set this to 1 if you do want atexit()s or stdio streams to be flushed on exit. This setting is controlled automatically in STANDALONE_WASM mode:

  • For a command (has a main function) this is always 1

  • For a reactor (no a main function) this is always 0

Default value: false

STACK_SIZE

The total stack size. There is no way to enlarge the stack, so this value must be large enough for the program’s requirements. If assertions are on, we will assert on not exceeding this, otherwise, it will fail silently.

Default value: 64*1024

MALLOC

What malloc()/free() to use, out of:

  • dlmalloc - a powerful general-purpose malloc

  • emmalloc - a simple and compact malloc designed for emscripten

  • emmalloc-debug - use emmalloc and add extra assertion checks

  • emmalloc-memvalidate - use emmalloc with assertions+heap consistency checking.

  • emmalloc-verbose - use emmalloc with assertions + verbose logging.

  • emmalloc-memvalidate-verbose - use emmalloc with assertions + heap consistency checking + verbose logging.

  • mimalloc - a powerful mulithreaded allocator. This is recommended in large applications that have malloc() contention, but it is larger and uses more memory.

  • none - no malloc() implementation is provided, but you must implement malloc() and free() yourself.

dlmalloc is necessary for split memory and other special modes, and will be used automatically in those cases. In general, if you don’t need one of those special modes, and if you don’t allocate very many small objects, you should use emmalloc since it’s smaller. Otherwise, if you do allocate many small objects, dlmalloc is usually worth the extra size. dlmalloc is also a good choice if you want the extra security checks it does (such as noticing metadata corruption in its internal data structures, which emmalloc does not do).

Default value: “dlmalloc”

ABORTING_MALLOC

If 1, then when malloc would fail we abort(). This is nonstandard behavior, but makes sense for the web since we have a fixed amount of memory that must all be allocated up front, and so (a) failing mallocs are much more likely than on other platforms, and (b) people need a way to find out how big that initial allocation (INITIAL_MEMORY) must be. If you set this to 0, then you get the standard malloc behavior of returning NULL (0) when it fails.

Setting ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH turns this off, as in that mode we default to the behavior of trying to grow and returning 0 from malloc on failure, like a standard system would. However, you can still set this flag to override that. This is a mostly-backwards-compatible change. Previously this option was ignored when growth was on. The current behavior is that growth turns it off by default, so for users that never specified the flag nothing changes. But if you do specify it, it will have an effect now, which it did not previously. If you don’t want that, just stop passing it in at link time.

Note that this setting does not affect the behavior of operator new in C++. This function will always abort on allocation failure if exceptions are disabled. If you want new to return 0 on failure, use it with std::nothrow.

Default value: true

INITIAL_HEAP

The initial amount of heap memory available to the program. This is the memory region available for dynamic allocations via sbrk, malloc and new.

Unlike INITIAL_MEMORY, this setting allows the static and dynamic regions of your programs memory to independently grow. In most cases we recommend using this setting rather than INITIAL_MEMORY. However, this setting does not work for imported memories (e.g. when dynamic linking is used).

Default value: 16777216

INITIAL_MEMORY

The initial amount of memory to use. Using more memory than this will cause us to expand the heap, which can be costly with typed arrays: we need to copy the old heap into a new one in that case. If ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH is set, this initial amount of memory can increase later; if not, then it is the final and total amount of memory.

By default, this value is calculated based on INITIAL_HEAP, STACK_SIZE, as well the size of static data in input modules.

(This option was formerly called TOTAL_MEMORY.)

Default value: -1

MAXIMUM_MEMORY

Set the maximum size of memory in the wasm module (in bytes). This is only relevant when ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH is set, as without growth, the size of INITIAL_MEMORY is the final size of memory anyhow.

Note that the default value here is 2GB, which means that by default if you enable memory growth then we can grow up to 2GB but no higher. 2GB is a natural limit for several reasons:

  • If the maximum heap size is over 2GB, then pointers must be unsigned in JavaScript, which increases code size. We don’t want memory growth builds to be larger unless someone explicitly opts in to >2GB+ heaps.

  • Historically no VM has supported more >2GB+, and only recently (Mar 2020) has support started to appear. As support is limited, it’s safer for people to opt into >2GB+ heaps rather than get a build that may not work on all VMs.

To use more than 2GB, set this to something higher, like 4GB.

(This option was formerly called WASM_MEM_MAX and BINARYEN_MEM_MAX.)

Default value: 2147483648

ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH

If false, we abort with an error if we try to allocate more memory than we can (INITIAL_MEMORY). If true, we will grow the memory arrays at runtime, seamlessly and dynamically. See https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=3907 regarding memory growth performance in chrome. Note that growing memory means we replace the JS typed array views, as once created they cannot be resized. (In wasm we can grow the Memory, but still need to create new views for JS.) Setting this option on will disable ABORTING_MALLOC, in other words, ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH enables fully standard behavior, of both malloc returning 0 when it fails, and also of being able to allocate more memory from the system as necessary.

Default value: false

MEMORY_GROWTH_GEOMETRIC_STEP

If ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH is true, this variable specifies the geometric overgrowth rate of the heap at resize. Specify MEMORY_GROWTH_GEOMETRIC_STEP=0 to disable overgrowing the heap at all, or e.g. MEMORY_GROWTH_GEOMETRIC_STEP=1.0 to double the heap (+100%) at every grow step. The larger this value is, the more memory the WebAssembly heap overreserves to reduce performance hiccups coming from memory resize, and the smaller this value is, the more memory is conserved, at the performance of more stuttering when the heap grows. (profiled to be on the order of ~20 msecs)

Default value: 0.20

MEMORY_GROWTH_GEOMETRIC_CAP

Specifies a cap for the maximum geometric overgrowth size, in bytes. Use this value to constrain the geometric grow to not exceed a specific rate. Pass MEMORY_GROWTH_GEOMETRIC_CAP=0 to disable the cap and allow unbounded size increases.

Default value: 96*1024*1024

MEMORY_GROWTH_LINEAR_STEP

If ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH is true and MEMORY_GROWTH_LINEAR_STEP == -1, then geometric memory overgrowth is utilized (above variable). Set MEMORY_GROWTH_LINEAR_STEP to a multiple of WASM page size (64KB), eg. 16MB to replace geometric overgrowth rate with a constant growth step size. When MEMORY_GROWTH_LINEAR_STEP is used, the variables MEMORY_GROWTH_GEOMETRIC_STEP and MEMORY_GROWTH_GEOMETRIC_CAP are ignored.

Default value: -1

MEMORY64

The “architecture” to compile for. 0 means the default wasm32, 1 is the full end-to-end wasm64 mode, and 2 is wasm64 for clang/lld but lowered to wasm32 in Binaryen (such that it can run on wasm32 engines, while internally using i64 pointers). Assumes WASM_BIGINT.

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Note

This is an experimental setting

Default value: 0

INITIAL_TABLE

Sets the initial size of the table when MAIN_MODULE or SIDE_MODULE is use (and not otherwise). Normally Emscripten can determine the size of the table at link time, but in SPLIT_MODULE mode, wasm-split often needs to grow the table, so the table size baked into the JS for the instrumented build will be too small after the module is split. This is a hack to allow users to specify a large enough table size that can be consistent across both builds. This setting may be removed at any time and should not be used except in conjunction with SPLIT_MODULE and dynamic linking.

Default value: -1

ALLOW_TABLE_GROWTH

If true, allows more functions to be added to the table at runtime. This is necessary for dynamic linking, and set automatically in that mode.

Default value: false

GLOBAL_BASE

Where global data begins; the start of static memory. A GLOBAL_BASE of 1024 or above is useful for optimizing load/store offsets, as it enables the –low-memory-unused pass

Default value: 1024

TABLE_BASE

Where table slots (function addresses) are allocated. This must be at least 1 to reserve the zero slot for the null pointer.

Default value: 1

USE_CLOSURE_COMPILER

Whether closure compiling is being run on this output

Default value: false

CLOSURE_WARNINGS

Deprecated: Use the standard warnings flags instead. e.g. -Wclosure, -Wno-closure, -Werror=closure. options: ‘quiet’, ‘warn’, ‘error’. If set to ‘warn’, Closure warnings are printed out to console. If set to ‘error’, Closure warnings are treated like errors, similar to -Werror compiler flag.

Note

This setting is deprecated

Default value: ‘quiet’

IGNORE_CLOSURE_COMPILER_ERRORS

Ignore closure warnings and errors (like on duplicate definitions)

Default value: false

DECLARE_ASM_MODULE_EXPORTS

If set to 1, each wasm module export is individually declared with a JavaScript “var” definition. This is the simple and recommended approach. However, this does increase code size (especially if you have many such exports), which can be avoided in an unsafe way by setting this to 0. In that case, no “var” is created for each export, and instead a loop (of small constant code size, no matter how many exports you have) writes all the exports received into the global scope. Doing so is dangerous since such modifications of the global scope can confuse external JS minifier tools, and also things can break if the scope the code is in is not the global scope (e.g. if you manually enclose them in a function scope).

Default value: true

INLINING_LIMIT

If set to 1, prevents inlining. If 0, we will inline normally in LLVM. This does not affect the inlining policy in Binaryen.

Note

Only applicable during compilation

Default value: false

SUPPORT_BIG_ENDIAN

If set to 1, perform acorn pass that converts each HEAP access into a function call that uses DataView to enforce LE byte order for HEAP buffer; This makes generated JavaScript run on BE as well as LE machines. (If 0, only LE systems are supported). Does not affect generated wasm.

Default value: false

SAFE_HEAP

Check each write to the heap, for example, this will give a clear error on what would be segfaults in a native build (like dereferencing 0). See runtime_safe_heap.js for the actual checks performed. Set to value 1 to test for safe behavior for both Wasm+Wasm2JS builds. Set to value 2 to test for safe behavior for only Wasm builds. (notably, Wasm-only builds allow unaligned memory accesses. Note, however, that on some architectures unaligned accesses can be very slow, so it is still a good idea to verify your code with the more strict mode 1)

Default value: 0

SAFE_HEAP_LOG

Log out all SAFE_HEAP operations

Default value: false

EMULATE_FUNCTION_POINTER_CASTS

Allows function pointers to be cast, wraps each call of an incorrect type with a runtime correction. This adds overhead and should not be used normally. Aside from making calls not fail, this tries to convert values as best it can. We use 64 bits (i64) to represent values, as if we wrote the sent value to memory and loaded the received type from the same memory (using truncs/extends/ reinterprets). This means that when types do not match the emulated values may not match (this is true of native too, for that matter - this is all undefined behavior). This approaches appears good enough to support Python, which is the main use case motivating this feature.

Default value: false

EXCEPTION_DEBUG

Print out exceptions in emscriptened code.

Default value: false

DEMANGLE_SUPPORT

If 1, export demangle and stackTrace JS library functions.

Note

This setting is deprecated

Default value: false

LIBRARY_DEBUG

Print out when we enter a library call (library*.js). You can also unset runtimeDebug at runtime for logging to cease, and can set it when you want it back. A simple way to set it in C++ is:

emscripten_run_script("runtimeDebug = ...;");

Default value: false

SYSCALL_DEBUG

Print out all musl syscalls, including translating their numeric index to the string name, which can be convenient for debugging. (Other system calls are not numbered and already have clear names; use LIBRARY_DEBUG to get logging for all of them.)

Default value: false

SOCKET_DEBUG

Log out socket/network data transfer.

Default value: false

FS_DEBUG

Register file system callbacks using trackingDelegate in library_fs.js

Default value: false

SOCKET_WEBRTC

As well as being configurable at compile time via the “-s” option the WEBSOCKET_URL and WEBSOCKET_SUBPROTOCOL settings may configured at run time via the Module object e.g. Module[‘websocket’] = {subprotocol: ‘base64, binary, text’}; Module[‘websocket’] = {url: ‘wss://’, subprotocol: ‘base64’}; You can set ‘subprotocol’ to null, if you don’t want to specify it Run time configuration may be useful as it lets an application select multiple different services.

Default value: false

WEBSOCKET_URL

A string containing either a WebSocket URL prefix (ws:// or wss://) or a complete RFC 6455 URL - “ws[s]:” “//” host [ “:” port ] path [ “?” query ]. In the (default) case of only a prefix being specified the URL will be constructed from prefix + addr + ‘:’ + port where addr and port are derived from the socket connect/bind/accept calls.

Default value: ‘ws://’

PROXY_POSIX_SOCKETS

If 1, the POSIX sockets API uses a native bridge process server to proxy sockets calls from browser to native world.

Default value: false

WEBSOCKET_SUBPROTOCOL

A string containing a comma separated list of WebSocket subprotocols as would be present in the Sec-WebSocket-Protocol header. You can set ‘null’, if you don’t want to specify it.

Default value: ‘binary’

OPENAL_DEBUG

Print out debugging information from our OpenAL implementation.

Default value: false

WEBSOCKET_DEBUG

If 1, prints out debugging related to calls from emscripten_web_socket_* functions in emscripten/websocket.h. If 2, additionally traces bytes communicated via the sockets.

Default value: false

GL_ASSERTIONS

Adds extra checks for error situations in the GL library. Can impact performance.

Default value: false

TRACE_WEBGL_CALLS

If enabled, prints out all API calls to WebGL contexts. (very verbose)

Default value: false

GL_DEBUG

Enables more verbose debug printing of WebGL related operations. As with LIBRARY_DEBUG, this is toggleable at runtime with option GL.debug.

Default value: false

GL_TESTING

When enabled, sets preserveDrawingBuffer in the context, to allow tests to work (but adds overhead)

Default value: false

GL_MAX_TEMP_BUFFER_SIZE

How large GL emulation temp buffers are

Default value: 2097152

GL_UNSAFE_OPTS

Enables some potentially-unsafe optimizations in GL emulation code

Default value: true

FULL_ES2

Forces support for all GLES2 features, not just the WebGL-friendly subset.

Default value: false

GL_EMULATE_GLES_VERSION_STRING_FORMAT

If true, glGetString() for GL_VERSION and GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION will return strings OpenGL ES format “Open GL ES … (WebGL …)” rather than the WebGL format. If false, the direct WebGL format strings are returned. Set this to true to make GL contexts appear like an OpenGL ES context in these version strings (at the expense of a little bit of added code size), and to false to make GL contexts appear like WebGL contexts and to save some bytes from the output.

Default value: true

GL_EXTENSIONS_IN_PREFIXED_FORMAT

If true, all GL extensions are advertised in both unprefixed WebGL extension format, but also in desktop/mobile GLES/GL extension format with GL_ prefix.

Default value: true

GL_SUPPORT_AUTOMATIC_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS

If true, adds support for automatically enabling all GL extensions for GLES/GL emulation purposes. This takes up code size. If you set this to 0, you will need to manually enable the extensions you need.

Default value: true

GL_SUPPORT_SIMPLE_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS

If true, the function emscripten_webgl_enable_extension() can be called to enable any WebGL extension. If false, to save code size, emscripten_webgl_enable_extension() cannot be called to enable any of extensions ‘ANGLE_instanced_arrays’, ‘OES_vertex_array_object’, ‘WEBGL_draw_buffers’, ‘WEBGL_multi_draw’, ‘WEBGL_draw_instanced_base_vertex_base_instance’, or ‘WEBGL_multi_draw_instanced_base_vertex_base_instance’, but the dedicated functions emscripten_webgl_enable_*() found in html5.h are used to enable each of those extensions. This way code size is increased only for the extensions that are actually used. N.B. if setting this to 0, GL_SUPPORT_AUTOMATIC_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS must be set to zero as well.

Default value: true

GL_TRACK_ERRORS

If set to 0, Emscripten GLES2->WebGL translation layer does not track the kind of GL errors that exist in GLES2 but do not exist in WebGL. Settings this to 0 saves code size. (Good to keep at 1 for development)

Default value: true

GL_SUPPORT_EXPLICIT_SWAP_CONTROL

If true, GL contexts support the explicitSwapControl context creation flag. Set to 0 to save a little bit of space on projects that do not need it.

Default value: false

GL_POOL_TEMP_BUFFERS

If true, calls to glUniform*fv and glUniformMatrix*fv utilize a pool of preallocated temporary buffers for common small sizes to avoid generating temporary garbage for WebGL 1. Disable this to optimize generated size of the GL library a little bit, at the expense of generating garbage in WebGL 1. If you are only using WebGL 2 and do not support WebGL 1, this is not needed and you can turn it off.

Default value: true

GL_EXPLICIT_UNIFORM_LOCATION

If true, enables support for the EMSCRIPTEN_explicit_uniform_location WebGL extension. See docs/EMSCRIPTEN_explicit_uniform_location.txt

Default value: false

GL_EXPLICIT_UNIFORM_BINDING

If true, enables support for the EMSCRIPTEN_uniform_layout_binding WebGL extension. See docs/EMSCRIPTEN_explicit_uniform_binding.txt

Default value: false

USE_WEBGL2

Deprecated. Pass -sMAX_WEBGL_VERSION=2 to target WebGL 2.0.

Default value: false

MIN_WEBGL_VERSION

Specifies the lowest WebGL version to target. Pass -sMIN_WEBGL_VERSION=1 to enable targeting WebGL 1, and -sMIN_WEBGL_VERSION=2 to drop support for WebGL 1.0

Default value: 1

MAX_WEBGL_VERSION

Specifies the highest WebGL version to target. Pass -sMAX_WEBGL_VERSION=2 to enable targeting WebGL 2. If WebGL 2 is enabled, some APIs (EGL, GLUT, SDL) will default to creating a WebGL 2 context if no version is specified. Note that there is no automatic fallback to WebGL1 if WebGL2 is not supported by the user’s device, even if you build with both WebGL1 and WebGL2 support, as that may not always be what the application wants. If you want such a fallback, you can try to create a context with WebGL2, and if that fails try to create one with WebGL1.

Default value: 1

WEBGL2_BACKWARDS_COMPATIBILITY_EMULATION

If true, emulates some WebGL 1 features on WebGL 2 contexts, meaning that applications that use WebGL 1/GLES 2 can initialize a WebGL 2/GLES3 context, but still keep using WebGL1/GLES 2 functionality that no longer is supported in WebGL2/GLES3. Currently this emulates GL_EXT_shader_texture_lod extension in GLSLES 1.00 shaders, support for unsized internal texture formats, and the GL_HALF_FLOAT_OES != GL_HALF_FLOAT mixup.

Default value: false

FULL_ES3

Forces support for all GLES3 features, not just the WebGL2-friendly subset. This automatically turns on FULL_ES2 and WebGL2 support.

Default value: false

LEGACY_GL_EMULATION

Includes code to emulate various desktop GL features. Incomplete but useful in some cases, see http://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/multimedia_and_graphics/OpenGL-support.html

Default value: false

GL_FFP_ONLY

If you specified LEGACY_GL_EMULATION = 1 and only use fixed function pipeline in your code, you can also set this to 1 to signal the GL emulation layer that it can perform extra optimizations by knowing that the user code does not use shaders at all. If LEGACY_GL_EMULATION = 0, this setting has no effect.

Default value: false

GL_PREINITIALIZED_CONTEXT

If you want to create the WebGL context up front in JS code, set this to 1 and set Module[‘preinitializedWebGLContext’] to a precreated WebGL context. WebGL initialization afterwards will use this GL context to render.

Default value: false

USE_WEBGPU

Enables support for WebGPU (via “webgpu/webgpu.h”).

Default value: false

STB_IMAGE

Enables building of stb-image, a tiny public-domain library for decoding images, allowing decoding of images without using the browser’s built-in decoders. The benefit is that this can be done synchronously, however, it will not be as fast as the browser itself. When enabled, stb-image will be used automatically from IMG_Load and IMG_Load_RW. You can also call the stbi_* functions directly yourself.

Default value: false

GL_DISABLE_HALF_FLOAT_EXTENSION_IF_BROKEN

From Safari 8 (where WebGL was introduced to Safari) onwards, OES_texture_half_float and OES_texture_half_float_linear extensions are broken and do not function correctly, when used as source textures. See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183321, https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169999, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54248633/cannot-create-half-float-oes-texture-from-uint16array-on-ipad

Default value: false

GL_WORKAROUND_SAFARI_GETCONTEXT_BUG

Workaround Safari WebGL issue: After successfully acquiring WebGL context on a canvas, calling .getContext() will always return that context independent of which ‘webgl’ or ‘webgl2’ context version was passed. See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222758 and https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/13295. Set this to 0 to force-disable the workaround if you know the issue will not affect you.

Default value: true

GL_ENABLE_GET_PROC_ADDRESS

If 1, link with support to glGetProcAddress() functionality. In WebGL, glGetProcAddress() causes a substantial code size and performance impact, since WebGL does not natively provide such functionality, and it must be emulated. Using glGetProcAddress() is not recommended. If you still need to use this, e.g. when porting an existing renderer, you can link with -sGL_ENABLE_GET_PROC_ADDRESS=1 to get support for this functionality.

Default value: true

JS_MATH

Use JavaScript math functions like Math.tan. This saves code size as we can avoid shipping compiled musl code. However, it can be significantly slower as it calls out to JS. It also may give different results as JS math is specced somewhat differently than libc, and can also vary between browsers.

Default value: false

POLYFILL_OLD_MATH_FUNCTIONS

If set, enables polyfilling for Math.clz32, Math.trunc, Math.imul, Math.fround.

Default value: false

LEGACY_VM_SUPPORT

Set this to enable compatibility emulations for old JavaScript engines. This gives you the highest possible probability of the code working everywhere, even in rare old browsers and shell environments. Specifically:

  • Add polyfilling for Math.clz32, Math.trunc, Math.imul, Math.fround. (-sPOLYFILL_OLD_MATH_FUNCTIONS)

  • Disable WebAssembly. (Must be paired with -sWASM=0)

  • Adjusts MIN_X_VERSION settings to 0 to include support for all browser versions.

  • Avoid TypedArray.fill, if necessary, in zeroMemory utility function.

You can also configure the above options individually.

Default value: false

ENVIRONMENT

Specify which runtime environments the JS output will be capable of running in. For maximum portability this can configured to support all environments or it can be limited to reduce overall code size. The supported environments are:

  • ‘web’ - the normal web environment.

  • ‘webview’ - just like web, but in a webview like Cordova; considered to be same as “web” in almost every place

  • ‘worker’ - a web worker environment.

  • ‘node’ - Node.js.

  • ‘shell’ - a JS shell like d8, js, or jsc.

This setting can be a comma-separated list of these environments, e.g., “web,worker”. If this is the empty string, then all environments are supported.

Note that the set of environments recognized here is not identical to the ones we identify at runtime using ENVIRONMENT_IS_*. Specifically:

  • We detect whether we are a pthread at runtime, but that’s set for workers and not for the main file so it wouldn’t make sense to specify here.

  • The webview target is basically a subset of web. It must be specified alongside web (e.g. “web,webview”) and we only use it for code generation at compile time, there is no runtime behavior change.

Note that by default we do not include the ‘shell’ environment since direct usage of d8, js, jsc is extremely rare.

Default value: ‘web,webview,worker,node’

LZ4

Enable this to support lz4-compressed file packages. They are stored compressed in memory, and decompressed on the fly, avoiding storing the entire decompressed data in memory at once. If you run the file packager separately, you still need to build the main program with this flag, and also pass –lz4 to the file packager. (You can also manually compress one on the client, using LZ4.loadPackage(), but that is less recommended.) Limitations:

  • LZ4-compressed files are only decompressed when needed, so they are not available for special preloading operations like pre-decoding of images using browser codecs, preloadPlugin stuff, etc.

  • LZ4 files are read-only.

Default value: false

DISABLE_EXCEPTION_CATCHING

Disables generating code to actually catch exceptions. This disabling is on by default as the overhead of exceptions is quite high in size and speed currently (in the future, wasm should improve that). When exceptions are disabled, if an exception actually happens then it will not be caught and the program will halt (so this will not introduce silent failures).

Note

This removes catching of exceptions, which is the main issue for speed, but you should build source files with -fno-exceptions to really get rid of all exceptions code overhead, as it may contain thrown exceptions that are never caught (e.g. just using std::vector can have that). -fno-rtti may help as well.

This option is mutually exclusive with EXCEPTION_CATCHING_ALLOWED.

This option only applies to Emscripten (JavaScript-based) exception handling and does not control the native Wasm exception handling.

[compile+link] - affects user code at compile and system libraries at link

Default value: 1

EXCEPTION_CATCHING_ALLOWED

Enables catching exception but only in the listed functions. This option acts like a more precise version of DISABLE_EXCEPTION_CATCHING=0.

This option is mutually exclusive with DISABLE_EXCEPTION_CATCHING.

This option only applies to Emscripten (JavaScript-based) exception handling and does not control the native Wasm exception handling.

[compile+link] - affects user code at compile and system libraries at link

Default value: []

DISABLE_EXCEPTION_THROWING

Internal: Tracks whether Emscripten should link in exception throwing (C++ ‘throw’) support library. This does not need to be set directly, but pass -fno-exceptions to the build disable exceptions support. (This is basically -fno-exceptions, but checked at final link time instead of individual .cpp file compile time) If the program does contain throwing code (some source files were not compiled with -fno-exceptions), and this flag is set at link time, then you will get errors on undefined symbols, as the exception throwing code is not linked in. If so you should either unset the option (if you do want exceptions) or fix the compilation of the source files so that indeed no exceptions are used). TODO(sbc): Move to settings_internal (current blocked due to use in test code).

This option only applies to Emscripten (JavaScript-based) exception handling and does not control the native Wasm exception handling.

Default value: false

EXPORT_EXCEPTION_HANDLING_HELPERS

Make the exception message printing function, ‘getExceptionMessage’ available in the JS library for use, by adding necessary symbols to EXPORTED_FUNCTIONS.

This works with both Emscripten EH and Wasm EH. When you catch an exception from JS, that gives you a user-thrown value in case of Emscripten EH, and a WebAssembly.Exception object in case of Wasm EH. ‘getExceptionMessage’ takes the user-thrown value in case of Emscripten EH and the WebAssembly.Exception object in case of Wasm EH, meaning in both cases you can pass a caught exception directly to the function.

When used with Wasm EH, this option additionally provides these functions in the JS library:

  • getCppExceptionTag: Returns the C++ tag

  • getCppExceptionThrownObjectFromWebAssemblyException: Given an WebAssembly.Exception object, returns the actual user-thrown C++ object address in Wasm memory.

Setting this option also adds refcount increasing and decreasing functions (‘incrementExceptionRefcount’ and ‘decrementExceptionRefcount’) in the JS library because if you catch an exception from JS, you may need to manipulate the refcount manually not to leak memory. What you need to do is different depending on the kind of EH you use (https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/17115).

See test_EXPORT_EXCEPTION_HANDLING_HELPERS in test/test_core.py for an example usage.

Default value: false

EXCEPTION_STACK_TRACES

When this is enabled, exceptions will contain stack traces and uncaught exceptions will display stack traces upon exiting. This defaults to true when ASSERTIONS is enabled. This option is for users who want exceptions’ stack traces but do not want other overheads ASSERTIONS can incur. This option implies EXPORT_EXCEPTION_HANDLING_HELPERS.

Default value: false

WASM_EXNREF

Emit instructions for the new Wasm exception handling proposal with exnref, which was adopted on Oct 2023. The implementation of the new proposal is still in progress and this feature is currently experimental.

Default value: false

NODEJS_CATCH_EXIT

Emscripten throws an ExitStatus exception to unwind when exit() is called. Without this setting enabled this can show up as a top level unhandled exception.

With this setting enabled a global uncaughtException handler is used to catch and handle ExitStatus exceptions. However, this means all other uncaught exceptions are also caught and re-thrown, which is not always desirable.

Default value: false

NODEJS_CATCH_REJECTION

Catch unhandled rejections in node. This only effect versions of node older than 15. Without this, old version node will print a warning, but exit with a zero return code. With this setting enabled, we handle any unhandled rejection and throw an exception, which will cause the process exit immediately with a non-0 return code. This not needed in Node 15+ so this setting will default to false if MIN_NODE_VERSION is 150000 or above.

Default value: true

ASYNCIFY

Whether to support async operations in the compiled code. This makes it possible to call JS functions from synchronous-looking code in C/C++.

  • 1 (default): Run binaryen’s Asyncify pass to transform the code using asyncify. This emits a normal wasm file in the end, so it works everywhere, but it has a significant cost in terms of code size and speed. See https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/asyncify.html

  • 2 (deprecated): Use -sJSPI instead.

Default value: 0

ASYNCIFY_IMPORTS

Imports which can do an async operation, in addition to the default ones that emscripten defines like emscripten_sleep. If you add more you will need to mention them to here, or else they will not work (in ASSERTIONS builds an error will be shown). Note that this list used to contain the default ones, which meant that you had to list them when adding your own; the default ones are now added automatically.

Default value: []

ASYNCIFY_IGNORE_INDIRECT

Whether indirect calls can be on the stack during an unwind/rewind. If you know they cannot, then setting this can be extremely helpful, as otherwise asyncify must assume an indirect call can reach almost everywhere.

Default value: false

ASYNCIFY_STACK_SIZE

The size of the asyncify stack - the region used to store unwind/rewind info. This must be large enough to store the call stack and locals. If it is too small, you will see a wasm trap due to executing an “unreachable” instruction. In that case, you should increase this size.

Default value: 4096

ASYNCIFY_REMOVE

If the Asyncify remove-list is provided, then the functions in it will not be instrumented even if it looks like they need to. This can be useful if you know things the whole-program analysis doesn’t, like if you know certain indirect calls are safe and won’t unwind. But if you get the list wrong things will break (and in a production build user input might reach code paths you missed during testing, so it’s hard to know you got this right), so this is not recommended unless you really know what are doing, and need to optimize every bit of speed and size.

The names in this list are names from the WebAssembly Names section. The wasm backend will emit those names in human-readable form instead of typical C++ mangling. For example, you should write Struct::func() instead of _ZN6Struct4FuncEv. C is also different from C++, as C names don’t end with parameters; as a result foo(int) in C++ would appear as just foo in C (C++ has parameters because it needs to differentiate overloaded functions). You will see warnings in the console if a name in the list is missing (these are not errors because inlining etc. may cause changes which would mean a single list couldn’t work for both -O0 and -O1 builds, etc.). You can inspect the wasm binary to look for the actual names, either directly or using wasm-objdump or wasm-dis, etc.

Simple * wildcard matching is supported.

To avoid dealing with limitations in operating system shells or build system escaping, the following substitutions can be made:

  • ‘ ‘ -> .,

  • & -> #,

  • , -> ?.

That is, the function “foo(char const*, int&)” can be inputted as “foo(char.const*?.int#)” on the command line instead.

Note: Whitespace is part of the function signature! I.e. “foo(char const , int &)” will not match “foo(char const, int&)”, and neither would “foo(const char*, int &)”.

Default value: []

ASYNCIFY_ADD

Functions in the Asyncify add-list are added to the list of instrumented functions, that is, they will be instrumented even if otherwise asyncify thinks they don’t need to be. As by default everything will be instrumented in the safest way possible, this is only useful if you use IGNORE_INDIRECT and use this list to fix up some indirect calls that do need to be instrumented.

See notes on ASYNCIFY_REMOVE about the names, including wildcard matching and character substitutions.

Default value: []

ASYNCIFY_PROPAGATE_ADD

If enabled, instrumentation status will be propagated from the add-list, ie. their callers, and their callers’ callers, and so on. If disabled then all callers must be manually added to the add-list (like the only-list).

Default value: true

ASYNCIFY_ONLY

If the Asyncify only-list is provided, then only the functions in the list will be instrumented. Like the remove-list, getting this wrong will break your application.

See notes on ASYNCIFY_REMOVE about the names, including wildcard matching and character substitutions.

Default value: []

ASYNCIFY_ADVISE

If enabled will output which functions have been instrumented and why.

Default value: false

ASYNCIFY_LAZY_LOAD_CODE

Allows lazy code loading: where emscripten_lazy_load_code() is written, we will pause execution, load the rest of the code, and then resume.

Default value: false

ASYNCIFY_DEBUG

Runtime debug logging from asyncify internals.

  • 1: Minimal logging.

  • 2: Verbose logging.

Default value: 0

ASYNCIFY_EXPORTS

Deprecated, use JSPI_EXPORTS instead.

Note

This setting is deprecated

Default value: []

JSPI

Use VM support for the JavaScript Promise Integration proposal. This allows async operations to happen without the overhead of modifying the wasm. This is experimental atm while spec discussion is ongoing, see https://github.com/WebAssembly/js-promise-integration/ TODO: document which of the following flags are still relevant in this mode (e.g. IGNORE_INDIRECT etc. are not needed)

Default value: 0

JSPI_EXPORTS

A list of exported module functions that will be asynchronous. Each export will return a Promise that will be resolved with the result. Any exports that will call an asynchronous import (listed in JSPI_IMPORTS) must be included here.

By default this includes main.

Default value: []

JSPI_IMPORTS

A list of imported module functions that will potentially do asynchronous work. The imported function should return a Promise when doing asynchronous work.

Note when using --js-library, the function can be marked with <function_name>_async:: true in the library instead of this setting.

Default value: []

EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS

Runtime elements that are exported on Module by default. We used to export quite a lot here, but have removed them all. You should use EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS for things you want to export from the runtime. Note that the name may be slightly misleading, as this is for any JS library element, and not just methods. For example, we can export the FS object by having “FS” in this list.

Default value: []

EXTRA_EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS

Deprecated, use EXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS instead.

Note

This setting is deprecated

Default value: []

INCOMING_MODULE_JS_API

A list of incoming values on the Module object in JS that we care about. If a value is not in this list, then we don’t emit code to check if you provide it on the Module object. For example, if you have this:

var Module = {
  print: (x) => console.log('print: ' + x),
  preRun: [() => console.log('pre run')]
};

Then MODULE_JS_API must contain ‘print’ and ‘preRun’; if it does not then we may not emit code to read and use that value. In other words, this option lets you set, statically at compile time, the list of which Module JS values you will be providing at runtime, so the compiler can better optimize.

Setting this list to [], or at least a short and concise set of names you actually use, can be very useful for reducing code size. By default, the list contains a set of commonly used symbols.

FIXME: should this just be 0 if we want everything?

Default value: (multi-line value, see settings.js)

CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS

If set to nonzero, the provided virtual filesystem if treated case-insensitive, like Windows and macOS do. If set to 0, the VFS is case-sensitive, like on Linux.

Default value: false

FILESYSTEM

If set to 0, does not build in any filesystem support. Useful if you are just doing pure computation, but not reading files or using any streams (including fprintf, and other stdio.h things) or anything related. The one exception is there is partial support for printf, and puts, hackishly. The compiler will automatically set this if it detects that syscall usage (which is static) does not require a full filesystem. If you still want filesystem support, use FORCE_FILESYSTEM

Default value: true

FORCE_FILESYSTEM

Makes full filesystem support be included, even if statically it looks like it is not used. For example, if your C code uses no files, but you include some JS that does, you might need this.

Default value: false

NODERAWFS

Enables support for the NODERAWFS filesystem backend. This is a special backend as it replaces all normal filesystem access with direct Node.js operations, without the need to do FS.mount(), and this backend only works with Node.js. The initial working directory will be same as process.cwd() instead of VFS root directory. Because this mode directly uses Node.js to access the real local filesystem on your OS, the code will not necessarily be portable between OSes - it will be as portable as a Node.js program would be, which means that differences in how the underlying OS handles permissions and errors and so forth may be noticeable.

Default value: false

NODE_CODE_CACHING

This saves the compiled wasm module in a file with name $WASM_BINARY_NAME.$V8_VERSION.cached and loads it on subsequent runs. This caches the compiled wasm code from v8 in node, which saves compiling on subsequent runs, making them start up much faster. The V8 version used in node is included in the cache name so that we don’t try to load cached code from another version, which fails silently (it seems to load ok, but we do actually recompile).

  • The only version known to work for sure is node 12.9.1, as this has regressed, see https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/18265#issuecomment-622971547

  • The default location of the .cached files is alongside the wasm binary, as mentioned earlier. If that is in a read-only directory, you may need to place them elsewhere. You can use the locateFile() hook to do so.

Default value: false

EXPORTED_FUNCTIONS

Symbols that are explicitly exported. These symbols are kept alive through LLVM dead code elimination, and also made accessible outside of the generated code even after running closure compiler (on “Module”). Native symbols listed here require an _ prefix.

By default if this setting is not specified on the command line the _main function will be implicitly exported. In STANDALONE_WASM mode the default export is __start (or __initialize if –no-entry is specified).

JS Library symbols can also be added to this list (without the leading $).

Default value: []

EXPORT_ALL

If true, we export all the symbols that are present in JS onto the Module object. This does not affect which symbols will be present - it does not prevent DCE or cause anything to be included in linking. It only does Module['X'] = X; for all X that end up in the JS file. This is useful to export the JS library functions on Module, for things like dynamic linking.

Default value: false

EXPORT_KEEPALIVE

If true, we export the symbols that are present in JS onto the Module object. It only does Module['X'] = X;

Default value: true

RETAIN_COMPILER_SETTINGS

Remembers the values of these settings, and makes them accessible through getCompilerSetting and emscripten_get_compiler_setting. To see what is retained, look for compilerSettings in the generated code.

Default value: false

DEFAULT_LIBRARY_FUNCS_TO_INCLUDE

JS library elements (C functions implemented in JS) that we include by default. If you want to make sure something is included by the JS compiler, add it here. For example, if you do not use some emscripten_* C API call from C, but you want to call it from JS, add it here. Note that the name may be slightly misleading, as this is for any JS library element, and not just functions. For example, you can include the Browser object by adding “$Browser” to this list.

If you want to both include and export a JS library symbol, it is enough to simply add it to EXPORTED_FUNCTIONS, without also adding it to DEFAULT_LIBRARY_FUNCS_TO_INCLUDE.

Default value: []

INCLUDE_FULL_LIBRARY

Include all JS library functions instead of the sum of DEFAULT_LIBRARY_FUNCS_TO_INCLUDE + any functions used by the generated code. This is needed when dynamically loading (i.e. dlopen) modules that make use of runtime library functions that are not used in the main module. Note that this only applies to js libraries, not C. You will need the main file to include all needed C libraries. For example, if a module uses malloc or new, you will need to use those in the main file too to pull in malloc for use by the module.

Default value: false

RELOCATABLE

If set to 1, we emit relocatable code from the LLVM backend; both globals and function pointers are all offset (by gb and fp, respectively) Automatically set for SIDE_MODULE or MAIN_MODULE.

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

MAIN_MODULE

A main module is a file compiled in a way that allows us to link it to a side module at runtime.

  • 1: Normal main module.

  • 2: DCE’d main module. We eliminate dead code normally. If a side module needs something from main, it is up to you to make sure it is kept alive.

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 0

SIDE_MODULE

Corresponds to MAIN_MODULE (also supports modes 1 and 2)

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 0

RUNTIME_LINKED_LIBS

Deprecated, list shared libraries directly on the command line instead.

Note

This setting is deprecated

Default value: []

BUILD_AS_WORKER

If set to 1, this is a worker library, a special kind of library that is run in a worker. See emscripten.h

Default value: false

PROXY_TO_WORKER

If set to 1, we build the project into a js file that will run in a worker, and generate an html file that proxies input and output to/from it.

Default value: false

PROXY_TO_WORKER_FILENAME

If set, the script file name the main thread loads. Useful if your project doesn’t run the main emscripten- generated script immediately but does some setup before

Default value: ‘’

PROXY_TO_PTHREAD

If set to 1, compiles in a small stub main() in between the real main() which calls pthread_create() to run the application main() in a pthread. This is something that applications can do manually as well if they wish, this option is provided as convenience.

The pthread that main() runs on is a normal pthread in all ways, with the one difference that its stack size is the same as the main thread would normally have, that is, STACK_SIZE. This makes it easy to flip between PROXY_TO_PTHREAD and non-PROXY_TO_PTHREAD modes with main() always getting the same amount of stack.

This proxies Module[‘canvas’], if present, and if OFFSCREENCANVAS_SUPPORT is enabled. This has to happen because this is the only chance - this browser main thread does the only pthread_create call that happens on that thread, so it’s the only chance to transfer the canvas from there.

Default value: false

LINKABLE

If set to 1, this file can be linked with others, either as a shared library or as the main file that calls a shared library. To enable that, we will not internalize all symbols and cull the unused ones, in other words, we will not remove unused functions and globals, which might be used by another module we are linked with.

MAIN_MODULE and SIDE_MODULE both imply this, so it not normally necessary to set this explicitly. Note that MAIN_MODULE and SIDE_MODULE mode 2 do not set this, so that we still do normal DCE on them, and in that case you must keep relevant things alive yourself using exporting.

Default value: false

STRICT

Emscripten ‘strict’ build mode: Drop supporting any deprecated build options. Set the environment variable EMCC_STRICT=1 or pass -sSTRICT to test that a codebase builds nicely in forward compatible manner. Changes enabled by this:

  • The C define EMSCRIPTEN is not defined (__EMSCRIPTEN__ always is, and is the correct thing to use).

  • STRICT_JS is enabled.

  • IGNORE_MISSING_MAIN is disabled.

  • AUTO_JS_LIBRARIES is disabled.

  • AUTO_NATIVE_LIBRARIES is disabled.

  • DEFAULT_TO_CXX is disabled.

  • USE_GLFW is set to 0 rather than 2 by default.

  • ALLOW_UNIMPLEMENTED_SYSCALLS is disabled.

  • INCOMING_MODULE_JS_API is set to empty by default.

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

IGNORE_MISSING_MAIN

Allow program to link with or without main symbol. If this is disabled then one must provide a main symbol or explicitly opt out by passing --no-entry or an EXPORTED_FUNCTIONS list that doesn’t include _main.

Default value: true

STRICT_JS

Add "use strict;" to generated JS

Default value: false

WARN_ON_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS

If set to 1, we will warn on any undefined symbols that are not resolved by the library_*.js files. Note that it is common in large projects to not implement everything, when you know what is not going to actually be called (and don’t want to mess with the existing buildsystem), and functions might be implemented later on, say in –pre-js, so you may want to build with -s WARN_ON_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS=0 to disable the warnings if they annoy you. See also ERROR_ON_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS. Any undefined symbols that are listed in- EXPORTED_FUNCTIONS will also be reported.

Default value: true

ERROR_ON_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS

If set to 1, we will give a link-time error on any undefined symbols (see WARN_ON_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS). To allow undefined symbols at link time set this to 0, in which case if an undefined function is called a runtime error will occur. Any undefined symbols that are listed in EXPORTED_FUNCTIONS will also be reported.

Default value: true

SMALL_XHR_CHUNKS

Use small chunk size for binary synchronous XHR’s in Web Workers. Used for testing. See test_chunked_synchronous_xhr in runner.py and library.js.

Default value: false

HEADLESS

If 1, will include shim code that tries to ‘fake’ a browser environment, in order to let you run a browser program (say, using SDL) in the shell. Obviously nothing is rendered, but this can be useful for benchmarking and debugging if actual rendering is not the issue. Note that the shim code is very partial - it is hard to fake a whole browser! - so keep your expectations low for this to work.

Default value: false

DETERMINISTIC

If 1, we force Date.now(), Math.random, etc. to return deterministic results. This also tries to make execution deterministic across machines and environments, for example, not doing anything different based on the browser’s language setting (which would mean you can get different results in different browsers, or in the browser and in node). Good for comparing builds for debugging purposes (and nothing else).

Default value: false

MODULARIZE

By default we emit all code in a straightforward way into the output .js file. That means that if you load that in a script tag in a web page, it will use the global scope. With MODULARIZE set, we instead emit the code wrapped in a function that returns a promise. The promise is resolved with the module instance when it is safe to run the compiled code, similar to the onRuntimeInitialized callback. You do not need to use the onRuntimeInitialized callback when using MODULARIZE.

(If WASM_ASYNC_COMPILATION is off, that is, if compilation is synchronous, then it would not make sense to return a Promise, and instead the Module object itself is returned, which is ready to be used.)

The default name of the function is Module, but can be changed using the EXPORT_NAME option. We recommend renaming it to a more typical name for a factory function, e.g. createModule.

You use the factory function like so:

const module = await EXPORT_NAME();

or:

let module;
EXPORT_NAME().then(instance => {
  module = instance;
});

The factory function accepts 1 parameter, an object with default values for the module instance:

const module = await EXPORT_NAME({ option: value, ... });

Note the parentheses - we are calling EXPORT_NAME in order to instantiate the module. This allows you to create multiple instances of the module.

Note that in MODULARIZE mode we do not look for a global Module object for default values. Default values must be passed as a parameter to the factory function.

The default .html shell file provided in MINIMAL_RUNTIME mode will create a singleton instance automatically, to run the application on the page. (Note that it does so without using the Promise API mentioned earlier, and so code for the Promise is not even emitted in the .js file if you tell emcc to emit an .html output.) The default .html shell file provided by traditional runtime mode is only compatible with MODULARIZE=0 mode, so when building with traditional runtime, you should provided your own html shell file to perform the instantiation when building with MODULARIZE=1. (For more details, see https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/7950)

If you add –pre-js or –post-js files, they will be included inside the factory function with the rest of the emitted code in order to be optimized together with it.

If you want to include code outside all of the generated code, including the factory function, you can use –extern-pre-js or –extern-post-js. While –pre-js and –post-js happen to do that in non-MODULARIZE mode, their intended usage is to add code that is optimized with the rest of the emitted code, allowing better dead code elimination and minification.

Default value: false

EXPORT_ES6

Export using an ES6 Module export rather than a UMD export. MODULARIZE must be enabled for ES6 exports and is implicitly enabled if not already set.

This is implicitly enabled if the output suffix is set to ‘mjs’.

Default value: false

USE_ES6_IMPORT_META

Use the ES6 Module relative import feature ‘import.meta.url’ to auto-detect WASM Module path. It might not be supported on old browsers / toolchains. This setting may not be disabled when Node.js is targeted (-sENVIRONMENT=*node*).

Default value: true

EXPORT_NAME

Global variable to export the module as for environments without a standardized module loading system (e.g. the browser and SM shell).

Default value: ‘Module’

DYNAMIC_EXECUTION

When set to 0, we do not emit eval() and new Function(), which disables some functionality (causing runtime errors if attempted to be used), but allows the emitted code to be acceptable in places that disallow dynamic code execution (chrome packaged app, privileged firefox app, etc.). Pass this flag when developing an Emscripten application that is targeting a privileged or a certified execution environment, see Firefox Content Security Policy (CSP) webpage for details: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Security-Policy/script-src in particular the ‘unsafe-eval’ and ‘wasm-unsafe-eval’ policies.

When this flag is set, the following features (linker flags) are unavailable:

  • RELOCATABLE: the function loadDynamicLibrary would need to eval().

and some features may fall back to slower code paths when they need to: Embind: uses eval() to jit functions for speed.

Additionally, the following Emscripten runtime functions are unavailable when DYNAMIC_EXECUTION=0 is set, and an attempt to call them will throw an exception:

  • emscripten_run_script(),

  • emscripten_run_script_int(),

  • emscripten_run_script_string(),

  • dlopen(),

  • the functions ccall() and cwrap() are still available, but they are restricted to only being able to call functions that have been exported in the Module object in advance.

When -sDYNAMIC_EXECUTION=2 is set, attempts to call to eval() are demoted to warnings instead of throwing an exception.

Default value: 1

BOOTSTRAPPING_STRUCT_INFO

whether we are in the generate struct_info bootstrap phase

Default value: false

EMSCRIPTEN_TRACING

Add some calls to emscripten tracing APIs

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_GLFW

Specify the GLFW version that is being linked against. Only relevant, if you are linking against the GLFW library. Valid options are 2 for GLFW2 and 3 for GLFW3.

Default value: 0

WASM

Whether to use compile code to WebAssembly. Set this to 0 to compile to JS instead of wasm.

Specify -sWASM=2 to target both WebAssembly and JavaScript at the same time. In that build mode, two files a.wasm and a.wasm.js are produced, and at runtime the WebAssembly file is loaded if browser/shell supports it. Otherwise the .wasm.js fallback will be used.

If WASM=2 is enabled and the browser fails to compile the WebAssembly module, the page will be reloaded in Wasm2JS mode.

Default value: 1

STANDALONE_WASM

STANDALONE_WASM indicates that we want to emit a wasm file that can run without JavaScript. The file will use standard APIs such as wasi as much as possible to achieve that.

This option does not guarantee that the wasm can be used by itself - if you use APIs with no non-JS alternative, we will still use those (e.g., OpenGL at the time of writing this). This gives you the option to see which APIs are missing, and if you are compiling for a custom wasi embedding, to add those to your embedding.

We may still emit JS with this flag, but the JS should only be a convenient way to run the wasm on the Web or in Node.js, and you can run the wasm by itself without that JS (again, unless you use APIs for which there is no non-JS alternative) in a wasm runtime like wasmer or wasmtime.

Note that even without this option we try to use wasi etc. syscalls as much as possible. What this option changes is that we do so even when it means a tradeoff with JS size. For example, when this option is set we do not import the Memory - importing it is useful for JS, so that JS can start to use it before the wasm is even loaded, but in wasi and other wasm-only environments the expectation is to create the memory in the wasm itself. Doing so prevents some possible JS optimizations, so we only do it behind this flag.

When this flag is set we do not legalize the JS interface, since the wasm is meant to run in a wasm VM, which can handle i64s directly. If we legalized it the wasm VM would not recognize the API. However, this means that the optional JS emitted won’t run if you use a JS API with an i64. You can use the WASM_BIGINT option to avoid that problem by using BigInts for i64s which means we don’t need to legalize for JS (but this requires a new enough JS VM).

Standalone builds require a main entry point by default. If you want to build a library (also known as a reactor) instead you can pass --no-entry.

Default value: false

BINARYEN_IGNORE_IMPLICIT_TRAPS

Whether to ignore implicit traps when optimizing in binaryen. Implicit traps are the traps that happen in a load that is out of bounds, or div/rem of 0, etc. With this option set, the optimizer assumes that loads cannot trap, and therefore that they have no side effects at all. This is not safe in general, as you may have a load behind a condition which ensures it it is safe; but if the load is assumed to not have side effects it could be executed unconditionally. For that reason this option is generally not useful on large and complex projects, but in a small and simple enough codebase it may help reduce code size a little bit.

Default value: false

BINARYEN_EXTRA_PASSES

A comma-separated list of extra passes to run in the binaryen optimizer, Setting this does not override/replace the default passes. It is appended at the end of the list of passes.

Default value: “”

WASM_ASYNC_COMPILATION

Whether to compile the wasm asynchronously, which is more efficient and does not block the main thread. This is currently required for all but the smallest modules to run in chrome.

(This option was formerly called BINARYEN_ASYNC_COMPILATION)

Default value: true

DYNCALLS

If set to 1, the dynCall() and dynCall_sig() API is made available to caller.

Default value: false

WASM_BIGINT

WebAssembly integration with JavaScript BigInt. When enabled we don’t need to legalize i64s into pairs of i32s, as the wasm VM will use a BigInt where an i64 is used. If WASM_BIGINT is present, the default minimum supported browser versions will be increased to the min version that supports BigInt.

Default value: false

EMIT_PRODUCERS_SECTION

WebAssembly defines a “producers section” which compilers and tools can annotate themselves in, and LLVM emits this by default. Emscripten will strip that out so that it is not emitted because it increases code size, and also some users may not want information about their tools to be included in their builds for privacy or security reasons, see https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions/issues/93.

Default value: false

EMIT_EMSCRIPTEN_LICENSE

Emits emscripten license info in the JS output.

Default value: false

LEGALIZE_JS_FFI

Whether to legalize the JS FFI interfaces (imports/exports) by wrapping them to automatically demote i64 to i32 and promote f32 to f64. This is necessary in order to interface with JavaScript. For non-web/non-JS embeddings, setting this to 0 may be desirable.

Note

This setting is deprecated

Default value: true

USE_SDL

Specify the SDL version that is being linked against. 1, the default, is 1.3, which is implemented in JS 2 is a port of the SDL C code on emscripten-ports When AUTO_JS_LIBRARIES is set to 0 this defaults to 0 and SDL is not linked in. Alternate syntax for using the port: –use-port=sdl2

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 0

USE_SDL_GFX

Specify the SDL_gfx version that is being linked against. Must match USE_SDL

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 0

USE_SDL_IMAGE

Specify the SDL_image version that is being linked against. Must match USE_SDL

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 1

USE_SDL_TTF

Specify the SDL_ttf version that is being linked against. Must match USE_SDL

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 1

USE_SDL_NET

Specify the SDL_net version that is being linked against. Must match USE_SDL

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 1

USE_ICU

1 = use icu from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=icu

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_ZLIB

1 = use zlib from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=zlib

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_BZIP2

1 = use bzip2 from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=bzip2

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_GIFLIB

1 = use giflib from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=giflib

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_LIBJPEG

1 = use libjpeg from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=libjpeg

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_LIBPNG

1 = use libpng from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=libpng

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_REGAL

1 = use Regal from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=regal

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_BOOST_HEADERS

1 = use Boost headers from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=boost_headers

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_BULLET

1 = use bullet from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=bullet

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_VORBIS

1 = use vorbis from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=vorbis

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_OGG

1 = use ogg from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=ogg

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_MPG123

1 = use mpg123 from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=mpg123

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_FREETYPE

1 = use freetype from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=freetype

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_SDL_MIXER

Specify the SDL_mixer version that is being linked against. Doesn’t have to match USE_SDL, but a good idea.

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 1

USE_HARFBUZZ

1 = use harfbuzz from harfbuzz upstream Alternate syntax: –use-port=harfbuzz

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

USE_COCOS2D

3 = use cocos2d v3 from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=cocos2d

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: 0

USE_MODPLUG

1 = use libmodplug from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=libmodplug

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

SDL2_IMAGE_FORMATS

Formats to support in SDL2_image. Valid values: bmp, gif, lbm, pcx, png, pnm, tga, xcf, xpm, xv

Default value: []

SDL2_MIXER_FORMATS

Formats to support in SDL2_mixer. Valid values: ogg, mp3, mod, mid

Default value: [“ogg”]

USE_SQLITE3

1 = use sqlite3 from emscripten-ports Alternate syntax: –use-port=sqlite3

Note

Applicable during both linking and compilation

Default value: false

SHARED_MEMORY

If 1, target compiling a shared Wasm Memory. [compile+link] - affects user code at compile and system libraries at link.

Default value: false

WASM_WORKERS

If 1, enables support for Wasm Workers. Wasm Workers enable applications to create threads using a lightweight web-specific API that builds on top of Wasm SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics API. When enabled, a new build output file a.ww.js will be generated to bootstrap the Wasm Worker JS contexts. If 2, enables support for Wasm Workers, but without using a separate a.ww.js file on the side. This can simplify deployment of builds, but will have a downside that the generated build will no longer be csp-eval compliant. [compile+link] - affects user code at compile and system libraries at link.

Default value: 0

AUDIO_WORKLET

If true, enables targeting Wasm Web Audio AudioWorklets. Check out the full documentation in site/source/docs/api_reference/wasm_audio_worklets.rst

Default value: 0

WEBAUDIO_DEBUG

If true, enables deep debugging of Web Audio backend.

Default value: 0

PTHREAD_POOL_SIZE

In web browsers, Workers cannot be created while the main browser thread is executing JS/Wasm code, but the main thread must regularly yield back to the browser event loop for Worker initialization to occur. This means that pthread_create() is essentially an asynchronous operation when called from the main browser thread, and the main thread must repeatedly yield back to the JS event loop in order for the thread to actually start. If your application needs to be able to synchronously create new threads, you can pre-create a pthread pool by specifying -sPTHREAD_POOL_SIZE=x, in which case the specified number of Workers will be preloaded into a pool before the application starts, and that many threads can then be available for synchronous creation. Note that this setting is a string, and will be emitted in the JS code (directly, with no extra quotes) so that if you set it to ‘5’ then 5 workers will be used in the pool, and so forth. The benefit of this being a string is that you can set it to something like ‘navigator.hardwareConcurrency’ (which will use the number of cores the browser reports, and is how you can get exactly enough workers for a threadpool equal to the number of cores). [link] - affects generated JS runtime code at link time

Default value: 0

PTHREAD_POOL_SIZE_STRICT

Normally, applications can create new threads even when the pool is empty. When application breaks out to the JS event loop before trying to block on the thread via pthread_join or any other blocking primitive, an extra Worker will be created and the thread callback will be executed. However, breaking out to the event loop requires custom modifications to the code to adapt it to the Web, and not something that works for off-the-shelf apps. Those apps without any modifications are most likely to deadlock. This setting ensures that, instead of a risking a deadlock, they get a runtime EAGAIN error instead that can at least be gracefully handled from the C / C++ side. Values:

  • 0 - disable warnings on thread pool exhaustion

  • 1 - enable warnings on thread pool exhaustion (default)

  • 2 - make thread pool exhaustion a hard error

Default value: 1

PTHREAD_POOL_DELAY_LOAD

If your application does not need the ability to synchronously create threads, but it would still like to opportunistically speed up initial thread startup time by prewarming a pool of Workers, you can specify the size of the pool with -sPTHREAD_POOL_SIZE=x, but then also specify -sPTHREAD_POOL_DELAY_LOAD, which will cause the runtime to not wait up at startup for the Worker pool to finish loading. Instead, the runtime will immediately start up and the Worker pool will asynchronously spin up in parallel on the background. This can shorten the time that pthread_create() calls take to actually start a thread, but without actually slowing down main application startup speed. If PTHREAD_POOL_DELAY_LOAD=0 (default), then the runtime will wait for the pool to start up before running main(). If you do need to synchronously wait on the created threads (e.g. via pthread_join), you must wait on the Module.pthreadPoolReady promise before doing so or you’re very likely to run into deadlocks. [link] - affects generated JS runtime code at link time

Default value: false

DEFAULT_PTHREAD_STACK_SIZE

Default stack size to use for newly created pthreads. When not set, this defaults to STACK_SIZE (which in turn defaults to 64k). Can also be set at runtime using pthread_attr_setstacksize(). Note that the wasm control flow stack is separate from this stack. This stack only contains certain function local variables, such as those that have their addresses taken, or ones that are too large to fit as local vars in wasm code.

Default value: 0

PTHREADS_PROFILING

True when building with –threadprofiler

Default value: false

ALLOW_BLOCKING_ON_MAIN_THREAD

It is dangerous to call pthread_join or pthread_cond_wait on the main thread, as doing so can cause deadlocks on the Web (and also it works using a busy-wait which is expensive). See https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/pthreads.html#blocking-on-the-main-browser-thread This may become set to 0 by default in the future; for now, this just warns in the console.

Default value: true

PTHREADS_DEBUG

If true, add in debug traces for diagnosing pthreads related issues.

Default value: false

EVAL_CTORS

This tries to evaluate code at compile time. The main use case is to eval global ctor functions, which are those that run before main(), but main() itself or parts of it can also be evalled. Evaluating code this way can avoid work at runtime, as it applies the results of the execution to memory and globals and so forth, “snapshotting” the wasm and then just running it from there when it is loaded.

This will stop when it sees something it cannot eval at compile time, like a call to an import. When running with this option you will see logging that indicates what is evalled and where it stops.

This optimization can either reduce or increase code size. If a small amount of code generates many changes in memory, for example, then overall size may increase.

LLVM’s GlobalOpt almost does this operation. It does in simple cases, where LLVM IR is not too complex for its logic to evaluate, but it isn’t powerful enough for e.g. libc++ iostream ctors. It is just hard to do at the LLVM IR level - LLVM IR is complex and getting more complex, so this would require GlobalOpt to have a full interpreter, plus a way to write back into LLVM IR global objects. At the wasm level, however, everything has been lowered into a simple low level, and we also just need to write bytes into an array, so this is easy for us to do. A further issue for LLVM is that it doesn’t know that we will not link in further code, so it only tries to optimize ctors with lowest priority (while we do know explicitly if dynamic linking is enabled or not).

If set to a value of 2, this also makes some “unsafe” assumptions, specifically that there is no input received while evalling ctors. That means we ignore args to main() as well as assume no environment vars are readable. This allows more programs to be optimized, but you need to make sure your program does not depend on those features - even just checking the value of argc can lead to problems.

Default value: 0

TEXTDECODER

Is enabled, use the JavaScript TextDecoder API for string marshalling. Enabled by default, set this to 0 to disable. If set to 2, we assume TextDecoder is present and usable, and do not emit any JS code to fall back if it is missing. In single threaded -Oz build modes, TEXTDECODER defaults to value == 2 to save code size.

Default value: 1

EMBIND_STD_STRING_IS_UTF8

Embind specific: If enabled, assume UTF-8 encoded data in std::string binding. Disable this to support binary data transfer.

Default value: true

EMBIND_AOT

Embind specific: If enabled, generate Embind’s JavaScript invoker functions at compile time and include them in the JS output file. When used with DYNAMIC_EXECUTION=0 this allows exported bindings to be just as fast as DYNAMIC_EXECUTION=1 mode, but without the need for eval(). If there are many bindings the JS output size may be larger though.

Default value: false

OFFSCREENCANVAS_SUPPORT

If set to 1, enables support for transferring canvases to pthreads and creating WebGL contexts in them, as well as explicit swap control for GL contexts. This needs browser support for the OffscreenCanvas specification.

Default value: false

OFFSCREENCANVASES_TO_PTHREAD

If you are using PROXY_TO_PTHREAD with OFFSCREENCANVAS_SUPPORT, then specify here a comma separated list of CSS ID selectors to canvases to proxy over to the pthread at program startup, e.g. ‘#canvas1, #canvas2’.

Default value: “#canvas”

OFFSCREEN_FRAMEBUFFER

If set to 1, enables support for WebGL contexts to render to an offscreen render target, to avoid the implicit swap behavior of WebGL where exiting any event callback would automatically perform a “flip” to present rendered content on screen. When an Emscripten GL context has Offscreen Framebuffer enabled, a single frame can be composited from multiple event callbacks, and the swap function emscripten_webgl_commit_frame() is then explicitly called to present the rendered content on screen.

The OffscreenCanvas feature also enables explicit GL frame swapping support, and also, -sOFFSCREEN_FRAMEBUFFER feature can be used to polyfill support for accessing WebGL in multiple threads in the absence of OffscreenCanvas support in browser, at the cost of some performance and latency. OffscreenCanvas and Offscreen Framebuffer support can be enabled at the same time, and allows one to utilize OffscreenCanvas where available, and to fall back to Offscreen Framebuffer otherwise.

Default value: false

FETCH_SUPPORT_INDEXEDDB

If nonzero, Fetch API supports backing to IndexedDB. If 0, IndexedDB is not utilized. Set to 0 if IndexedDB support is not interesting for target application, to save a few kBytes.

Default value: true

FETCH_DEBUG

If nonzero, prints out debugging information in library_fetch.js

Default value: false

FETCH

If nonzero, enables emscripten_fetch API.

Default value: false

WASMFS

ATTENTION [WIP]: Experimental feature. Please use at your own risk. This will eventually replace the current JS file system implementation. If set to 1, uses new filesystem implementation.

Note

This is an experimental setting

Default value: false

SINGLE_FILE

If set to 1, embeds all subresources in the emitted file as base64 string literals. Embedded subresources may include (but aren’t limited to) wasm, asm.js, and static memory initialization code.

When using code that depends on this option, your Content Security Policy may need to be updated. Specifically, embedding asm.js requires the script-src directive to allow ‘unsafe-inline’, and using a Worker requires the child-src directive to allow blob:. If you aren’t using Content Security Policy, or your CSP header doesn’t include either script-src or child-src, then you can safely ignore this warning.

Default value: false

AUTO_JS_LIBRARIES

If set to 1, all JS libraries will be automatically available at link time. This gets set to 0 in STRICT mode (or with MINIMAL_RUNTIME) which mean you need to explicitly specify -lfoo.js in at link time in order to access library function in library_foo.js.

Default value: true

AUTO_NATIVE_LIBRARIES

Like AUTO_JS_LIBRARIES but for the native libraries such as libgl, libal and libhtml5. If this is disabled it is necessary to explicitly add e.g. -lhtml5 and also to first build the library using embuilder.

Default value: true

MIN_FIREFOX_VERSION

Specifies the oldest major version of Firefox to target. I.e. all Firefox versions >= MIN_FIREFOX_VERSION are desired to work. Pass -sMIN_FIREFOX_VERSION=majorVersion to drop support for Firefox versions older than < majorVersion. Firefox 79 was released on 2020-07-28. MAX_INT (0x7FFFFFFF, or -1) specifies that target is not supported. Minimum supported value is 34 which was released on 2014-12-01.

Default value: 79

MIN_SAFARI_VERSION

Specifies the oldest version of desktop Safari to target. Version is encoded in MMmmVV, e.g. 70101 denotes Safari 7.1.1. Safari 14.1.0 was released on April 26, 2021, bundled with macOS 11.0 Big Sur and iOS 14.5. The previous default, Safari 12.0.0 was released on September 17, 2018, bundled with macOS 10.14.0 Mojave. NOTE: Emscripten is unable to produce code that would work in iOS 9.3.5 and older, i.e. iPhone 4s, iPad 2, iPad 3, iPad Mini 1, Pod Touch 5 and older, see https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/pull/7191. MAX_INT (0x7FFFFFFF, or -1) specifies that target is not supported. Minimum supported value is 90000 which was released in 2015.

Default value: 140100

MIN_CHROME_VERSION

Specifies the oldest version of Chrome. E.g. pass -sMIN_CHROME_VERSION=58 to drop support for Chrome 57 and older. This setting also applies to modern Chromium-based Edge, which shares version numbers with Chrome. Chrome 85 was released on 2020-08-25. MAX_INT (0x7FFFFFFF, or -1) specifies that target is not supported. Minimum supported value is 32, which was released on 2014-01-04.

Default value: 85

MIN_NODE_VERSION

Specifies minimum node version to target for the generated code. This is distinct from the minimum version required run the emscripten compiler. This version aligns with the current Ubuuntu TLS 20.04 (Focal). Version is encoded in MMmmVV, e.g. 181401 denotes Node 18.14.01. Minimum supported value is 101900, which was released 2020-02-05.

Default value: 160000

SUPPORT_ERRNO

Whether we support setting errno from JS library code. In MINIMAL_RUNTIME builds, this option defaults to 0.

Note

This setting is deprecated

Default value: true

MINIMAL_RUNTIME

If true, uses minimal sized runtime without POSIX features, Module, preRun/preInit/etc., Emscripten built-in XHR loading or library_browser.js. Enable this setting to target the smallest code size possible. Set MINIMAL_RUNTIME=2 to further enable even more code size optimizations. These opts are quite hacky, and work around limitations in Closure and other parts of the build system, so they may not work in all generated programs (But can be useful for really small programs).

By default, no symbols will be exported on the Module object. In order to export kept alive symbols, please use -sEXPORT_KEEPALIVE=1.

Default value: 0

MINIMAL_RUNTIME_STREAMING_WASM_COMPILATION

If set to 1, MINIMAL_RUNTIME will utilize streaming WebAssembly compilation, where WebAssembly module is compiled already while it is being downloaded. In order for this to work, the web server MUST properly serve the .wasm file with a HTTP response header “Content-Type: application/wasm”. If this HTTP header is not present, e.g. Firefox 73 will fail with an error message TypeError: Response has unsupported MIME type and Chrome 78 will fail with an error message Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Failed to execute ‘compile’ on ‘WebAssembly’: Incorrect response MIME type. Expected ‘application/wasm’. If set to 0 (default), streaming WebAssembly compilation is disabled, which means that the WebAssembly Module will first be downloaded fully, and only then compilation starts. For large .wasm modules and production environments, this should be set to 1 for faster startup speeds. However this setting is disabled by default since it requires server side configuration and for really small pages there is no observable difference (also has a ~100 byte impact to code size)

Default value: false

MINIMAL_RUNTIME_STREAMING_WASM_INSTANTIATION

If set to 1, MINIMAL_RUNTIME will utilize streaming WebAssembly instantiation, where WebAssembly module is compiled+instantiated already while it is being downloaded. Same restrictions/requirements apply as with MINIMAL_RUNTIME_STREAMING_WASM_COMPILATION. MINIMAL_RUNTIME_STREAMING_WASM_COMPILATION and MINIMAL_RUNTIME_STREAMING_WASM_INSTANTIATION cannot be simultaneously active. Which one of these two is faster depends on the size of the wasm module, the size of the JS runtime file, and the size of the preloaded data file to download, and the browser in question.

Default value: false

SUPPORT_LONGJMP

If set to ‘emscripten’ or ‘wasm’, compiler supports setjmp() and longjmp(). If set to 0, these APIs are not available. If you are using C++ exceptions, but do not need setjmp()+longjmp() API, then you can set this to 0 to save a little bit of code size and performance when catching exceptions.

‘emscripten’: (default) Emscripten setjmp/longjmp handling using JavaScript ‘wasm’: setjmp/longjmp handling using Wasm EH instructions (experimental)

  • 0: No setjmp/longjmp handling

  • 1: Default setjmp/longjmp/handling, depending on the mode of exceptions. ‘wasm’ if ‘-fwasm-exception’ is used, ‘emscripten’ otherwise.

[compile+link] - at compile time this enables the transformations needed for longjmp support at codegen time, while at link it allows linking in the library support.

Default value: true

DISABLE_DEPRECATED_FIND_EVENT_TARGET_BEHAVIOR

If set to 1, disables old deprecated HTML5 API event target lookup behavior. When enabled, there is no “Module.canvas” object, no magic “null” default handling, and DOM element ‘target’ parameters are taken to refer to CSS selectors, instead of referring to DOM IDs.

Default value: true

HTML5_SUPPORT_DEFERRING_USER_SENSITIVE_REQUESTS

Certain browser DOM API operations, such as requesting fullscreen mode transition or pointer lock require that the request originates from within an user initiated event, such as mouse click or keyboard press. Refactoring an application to follow this kind of program structure can be difficult, so HTML5_SUPPORT_DEFERRING_USER_SENSITIVE_REQUESTS allows transparent emulation of this by deferring such requests until a suitable event callback is generated. Set this to 0 to disable support for deferring to on save code size if your application does not need support for deferred calls.

Default value: true

MINIFY_HTML

Specifies whether the generated .html file is run through html-minifier. The set of optimization passes run by html-minifier depends on debug and optimization levels. In -g2 and higher, no minification is performed. In -g1, minification is done, but whitespace is retained. Minification requires at least -O1 or -Os to be used. Pass -sMINIFY_HTML=0 to explicitly choose to disable HTML minification altogether.

Default value: true

MAYBE_WASM2JS

Whether we may be using wasm2js. This compiles to wasm normally, but lets you run wasm2js later on the wasm, and you can pick between running the normal wasm or that wasm2js code. For details of how to do that, see the test_maybe_wasm2js test. This option can be useful for debugging and bisecting.

Default value: false

ASAN_SHADOW_SIZE

This option is no longer used. The appropriate shadow memory size is now calculated from INITIAL_MEMORY and MAXIMUM_MEMORY. Will be removed in a future release.

Default value: -1

USE_OFFSET_CONVERTER

Whether we should use the offset converter. This is needed for older versions of v8 (<7.7) that does not give the hex module offset into wasm binary in stack traces, as well as for avoiding using source map entries across function boundaries.

Default value: false

LOAD_SOURCE_MAP

Whether we should load the WASM source map at runtime. This is enabled automatically when using -gsource-map with sanitizers.

Default value: false

DEFAULT_TO_CXX

Default to c++ mode even when run as emcc rather then emc++. When this is disabled em++ is required linking C++ programs. Disabling this will match the behaviour of gcc/g++ and clang/clang++.

Default value: true

PRINTF_LONG_DOUBLE

While LLVM’s wasm32 has long double = float128, we don’t support printing that at full precision by default. Instead we print as 64-bit doubles, which saves libc code size. You can flip this option on to get a libc with full long double printing precision.

Default value: false

SEPARATE_DWARF_URL

Setting this affects the path emitted in the wasm that refers to the DWARF file, in -gseparate-dwarf mode. This allows the debugging file to be hosted in a custom location.

Default value: ‘’

ABORT_ON_WASM_EXCEPTIONS

Abort on unhandled excptions that occur when calling exported WebAssembly functions. This makes the program behave more like a native program where the OS would terminate the process and no further code can be executed when an unhandled exception (e.g. out-of-bounds memory access) happens. This will instrument all exported functions to catch thrown exceptions and call abort() when they happen. Once the program aborts any exported function calls will fail with a “program has already aborted” exception to prevent calls into code with a potentially corrupted program state. This adds a small fixed amount to code size in optimized builds and a slight overhead for the extra instrumented function indirection. Enable this if you want Emscripten to handle unhandled exceptions nicely at the cost of a few bytes extra. Exceptions that occur within the main function are already handled via an alternative mechanimsm.

Default value: false

PURE_WASI

Build binaries that use as many WASI APIs as possible, and include additional JS support libraries for those APIs. This allows emscripten to produce binaries are more WASI compliant and also allows it to process and execute WASI binaries built with other SDKs (e.g. wasi-sdk). This setting is experimental and subject to change or removal. Implies STANDALONE_WASM.

Note

This is an experimental setting

Default value: false

IMPORTED_MEMORY

Set to 1 to define the WebAssembly.Memory object outside of the wasm module. By default the wasm module defines the memory and exports it to JavaScript. Use of the following settings will enable this settings since they depend on being able to define the memory in JavaScript: - -pthread - RELOCATABLE - ASYNCIFY_LAZY_LOAD_CODE - WASM2JS (WASM=0)

Default value: false

SPLIT_MODULE

Generate code to loading split wasm modules. This option will automatically generate two wasm files as output, one with the .orig suffix and one without. The default file (without the suffix) when run will generate instrumentation data can later be fed into wasm-split (the binaryen tool). As well as this the generated JS code will contains help functions to loading split modules.

Default value: false

AUTOLOAD_DYLIBS

For MAIN_MODULE builds, automatically load any dynamic library dependencies on startup, before loading the main module.

Default value: true

ALLOW_UNIMPLEMENTED_SYSCALLS

Include unimplemented JS syscalls to be included in the final output. This allows programs that depend on these syscalls at runtime to be compiled, even though these syscalls will fail (or do nothing) at runtime.

Default value: true

TRUSTED_TYPES

Allow calls to Worker(…) and importScripts(…) to be Trusted Types compatible. Trusted Types is a Web Platform feature designed to mitigate DOM XSS by restricting the usage of DOM sink APIs. See https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-trusted-types/.

Default value: false

POLYFILL

When targeting older browsers emscripten will sometimes require that polyfills be included in the output. If you would prefer to take care of polyfilling yourself via some other mechanism you can prevent emscripten from generating these by passing -sNO_POLYFILL or -sPOLYFILL=0 With default browser targets emscripten does not need any polyfills so this settings is only needed when also explicitly targeting older browsers.

Default value: true

RUNTIME_DEBUG

If true, add tracing to core runtime functions. This setting is enabled by default if any of the following debugging settings are enabled: - PTHREADS_DEBUG - DYLINK_DEBUG - LIBRARY_DEBUG - GL_DEBUG - OPENAL_DEBUG - EXCEPTION_DEBUG - SYSCALL_DEBUG - WEBSOCKET_DEBUG - SOCKET_DEBUG - FETCH_DEBUG

Default value: false

LEGACY_RUNTIME

Include JS library symbols that were previously part of the default runtime. Without this, such symbols can be made available by adding them to DEFAULT_LIBRARY_FUNCS_TO_INCLUDE, or via the dependencies of another JS library symbol.

Default value: false

SIGNATURE_CONVERSIONS

User-defined functions to wrap with signature conversion, which take or return pointer argument. Only affects MEMORY64=1 builds, see create_pointer_conversion_wrappers in emscripten.py for details. Use _ for non-pointer arguments, p for pointer/i53 arguments, and P for optional pointer/i53 values. Example use -sSIGNATURE_CONVERSIONS=someFunction:_p,anotherFunction:p

Default value: []