Cretonne Code Generator

Cretonne is a low-level retargetable code generator. It translates a target-independent intermediate language into executable machine code.

This is a work in progress that is not yet functional.

Cretonne is designed to be a code generator for WebAssembly with these design goals:

Portable semantics

As far as possible, Cretonne's input language has well-defined semantics that are the same on all target architectures. The semantics are usually the same as WebAssembly's.

Fast sandbox verification

Cretonne's input language has a safe subset for sandboxed code. No advanced analysis is required to verify memory safety as long as only the safe subset is used. The safe subset is expressive enough to implement WebAssembly.

Scalable performance

Cretonne can be configured to generate code as quickly as possible, or it can generate very good code at the cost of slower compile times.

Predictable performance

When optimizing, Cretonne focuses on adapting the target-independent IL to the quirks of the target architecture. There are no advanced optimizations that sometimes work, sometimes fail.

For more information, see the documentation.

Building Cretonne

Cretonne is using the Cargo package manager format. First, ensure you have installed a current stable rust (stable, beta, and nightly should all work, but only stable and beta are tested consistently). Then, change the working directory to your clone of cretonne and run:

cargo build

This will create a target/debug directory where you can find the generated binary.

To build the optimized binary for release:

cargo build --release

You can then run tests with:

./test-all.sh

You may need to install the wat2wasm tool from the wabt project in order to run all of the WebAssembly tests. Tests requiring wat2wasm are ignored if the tool is not installed.

Building the documentation

To build the Cretonne documentation, you need the Sphinx documentation generator:

$ pip install sphinx sphinx-autobuild sphinx_rtd_theme
$ cd cretonne/docs
$ make html
$ open _build/html/index.html

We don't support Sphinx versions before 1.4 since the format of index tuples has changed.