How to include ncurses while using Emscripten emcc and make on Mac

Question

I'm trying to build a project (namely, Angband's source - http://rephial.org/downloads/3.3/angband-v3.3.2.tar.gz) with Emscripten's emcc in order to port it to Javascript and ultimately build an online version.

I've managed to get the process started with

emconfigure ./configure make

which begins to successfully start generating LLVM bitcode .o files, but then it hangs up on main-gcu.c with 'main-gcu.c:43:11: fatal error: 'ncurses.h' file not found'

I believe main-gcu.c is the only file that references ncurses, but I just can't figure out how to include the library while compiling. Is there a way to specify including ncurses with 'make', or should I compile the main-gcu.c file individually, with 'emcc main-gcu.c -c -lncurses'? I tried doing that but that led to another error with emcc being unable to find other actually included header files two levels down (it couldn't find headers that were included by a header included by main-gcu.c - anyway to fix that?).

I'm also not certain if I have/need to install the ncurses library on Mac OSX. All I can really find are references to libncurses5-dev for Linux.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think you misunderstand the compilation via Emscripten. I will try to point out a few problems you are facing.

1. The general rule is that all tools of Emscripten ONLY can turn LLVM formats (e.g. BITCODE) into JavaScript. emconfigure, emmake, ... modify the build environment so that your sourcecode is compiled to one of the LLVM formats (there are exceptions to the rule but nevermind). So anything you want to link against your final result has to be in a LLVM format, as well (which by default ncurses is not).

2. Since the output is JavaScript, there is no chance to execute any program code in different threads. While a lot of C/C++ code does use a thread for the UI and others for processing, such a model does NOT work for Emscripten. So in order to get the software compiling/running you will have to rewrite the parts that use threading. See emscripten_set_main_loop for pointers.

3. Even if you have the libraries compiled you then have to statically link them to Emscripten. At this point it is less of a technical problem but more of a license issue since if your library is licensed under e.g. LGPL due to static linking the GPL terms are effective.

I hope all clarity finally vanished ;)