Building and Running

Requirements

The runtime’s build is managed by cmake, which also takes care of downloading the build dependencies. To properly manage the Rust toolchain, the build script expects rustup to be installed in the system.

See also Project workflow using just for documentation on how to use just to streamline the project interface.

Usage

Step 1: Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/bytecodealliance/StarlingMonkey
cd StarlingMonkey

Step 2: Run the configuration script

Choose one of the following configurations:

  • For a release configuration:

    cmake -S . -B cmake-build-release -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

  • For a debug configuration:

    cmake -S . -B cmake-build-debug -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

Step 3: Build the runtime

Building the runtime is done in two phases: first, cmake is used to build a raw version as a WebAssembly core module. Then, that module is turned into a WebAssembly Component using the componentize.sh script.

  • Build the WebAssembly component

    The following command will build the runtime, creating the files starling-raw.wasm and starling.wasm in the cmake-build-release directory:

    # Use cmake-build-debug for the debug build
# Change the value for `--parallel` to match the number of CPU cores in your system
cmake --build cmake-build-release --parallel 8 --target starling

  • Test the runtime

    The starling.wasm component can be used to load and evaluate JS code dynamically:

    wasmtime -S http starling.wasm -e "console.log('hello world')"
# or, to load a file:
wasmtime -S http --dir . starling.wasm index.js

  • Create components from JS files (alternative approach)

    Alternatively, the componentize.js script also provided in the build directory lets us create a component from a JS file:

    cd cmake-build-release
./componentize.sh index.js
wasmtime -S http --dir . index.wasm

    This way, the JS file will be loaded during componentization, and the top-level code will be executed, and can e.g. register a handler for the fetch event to serve HTTP requests.