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Is there any C interpreter written in javascript or java ?
I don't need a full interpreter but I need to be able to do a step by step execution of the program and being able to see the values of variables, the stack...all that in a web interface.
The idea is to help C beginners by showing them the step by step execution of the program. We are using GWT to build the interface so if something exists in Java we should be able to use it.
I can modify it to suit my needs but if I can avoid to write the parser / abstract-syntax tree walker / stack manipulation... that would be great.
To be clear I don't want to simulate the complete C because some programs can be really tricky.
By step I mean a basic operation such as : expression evaluation, affectation, function call.
The C I want to simulate will contains : variables, for, while, functions, arrays, pointers, maths functions. No goto, string functions, ctypes.h, setjmp.h... (at least for now).
Here is a prototype : http://www.di.ens.fr/~fevrier/war/simu.html
In this example we have manually converted the C code to a javascript representation but it's limited (expressions such as a == 2 || a = 1 are not handled) and is limited to programs manually converted.
We have a our disposal a C compiler on a remote server so we can check if the code is correct (and doesn't have any undefined behavior). The parsing / AST construction can also be done remotely (so any language) but the AST walking needs to be in javascript in order to run on the client side.
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It is possible to implement a C API in JavaScript! This is the approach used in many of Emscripten's libraries, like SDL1 and OpenGL. You can use it to write your own APIs to call from C/C++.
However, the inner workings of JavaScript is closer to a dynamically-typed, interpreted language such as Python or Ruby. JavaScript is an interpreted language, not a compiled language. A program such as C++ or Java needs to be compiled before it is run.
To create an interpreter first you need to create a lexer to get the tokens of your input program. Next you create a parser that takes those tokens and, by following the rules of a formal grammar, returns an AST of your input program. Finally, the interpreter takes that AST and interprets it in some way.
A JavaScript engine doesn't need both an interpreter and a compiler. There are JS engines that interpret all code, and others that compile all code.
There's a C grammar available for antlr that you can use to generate a C parser in Java, and possibly JavaScript too.
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