Building.md

Building WAVM from source

To build WAVM, you'll need CMake and LLVM 9.0+. If CMake can't find your LLVM directory, you can manually give it the location in the LLVM_DIR CMake configuration variable. Note that on Windows, you must compile LLVM from source, and manually point the LLVM_DIR configuration variable at <LLVM build directory>\lib\cmake\llvm.

Prerequisites

• CMake 3.8 or higher - On Linux, it is probably available via your package manager. For example, you can install it on Ubuntu with sudo apt install cmake. Otherwise, you can download it from the CMake website.

• LLVM 6.0

  • On Ubuntu/Debian, builds are available from the LLVM apt repo.
  • On most other OSes, you can download an installer from the LLVM project download page.
  • If you want debug symbols, or a build is not available for your system, you may build LLVM from source. Read Getting Started with the LLVM System and Building LLVM with CMake.

Windows

You can use Visual Studio 2019+ to compile WAVM. If you don't have Visual Studio, you can use the freely available Visual Studio C++ Build Tools for Visual Studio or Visual Studio Community, both available from the Visual Studio download page.

Linux

You'll need a C/C++ compiler. gcc and clang are known to compile WAVM correctly.

MacOS

You'll need to install Xcode from the App Store.

Configure a WAVM build

1. Create a new directory: <build_dir>

2. In a shell, navigate to that directory, and run:

   cmake <path to WAVM source> -G <generator> -DLLVM_DIR=<path to LLVM build>/lib/cmake/llvm
   

   What you pass as <generator> depends on your platform:

   • For Windows, you'll use either "Visual Studio 16 2019" (aka Visual Studio 2019).
   • For Linux and MacOS, you'll use "Unix Makefiles".

   If cmake executes successfully, it will create either a Visual Studio solution file or makefiles in <build_dir>, depending on the generator used.

Building WAVM

3. On MacOS and Linux, in the <build_dir> that you configured in the previous step, simply run the make command.

   On Windows, open <build_dir>/WAVM.sln in Visual Studio and build the solution.

4. If the build completed successfully, the WAVM executable will now be in <build_dir>/bin.

Continue to: Exploring the WAVM source