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Quick Way to Port Existing C/C++ Chemoinformatics Toolkits to the Web Using Emscripten.
Chen Jiang1, Xi Jin1
1Department of Organic Chemistry and ‡Department of Foreign Languages, China Pharmaceutical University , Nanjing 210009, Jiangsu, China.
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
|September 8, 2017
Summary
Emscripten, an open-source compiler, efficiently converts C/C++ code to JavaScript. This enables web deployment of chemoinformatics tools with performance comparable to native applications.
Area of Science:
- Computational Chemistry
- Web Technologies
- Software Engineering
Background:
- Chemoinformatics and molecular calculation tools are often developed in C/C++.
- Porting these tools to the web is challenging due to language barriers and performance requirements.
- Web-based access can significantly broaden the usability and accessibility of these scientific tools.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of using Emscripten for porting C/C++ chemoinformatics libraries to the web.
- To assess the performance and file size of Emscripten-compiled JavaScript code compared to native executables and handwritten JavaScript.
- To demonstrate the potential of Emscripten for reusing existing scientific codebases on the web.
Main Methods:
- Utilized Emscripten to compile established C/C++ chemoinformatics toolkits and libraries into JavaScript.
- Developed a series of benchmarks to compare the performance of compiled JavaScript code against native C/C++ programs.
- Analyzed the file sizes of the generated JavaScript code in relation to native program sizes.
- Compared the performance of Emscripten-generated code with manually written JavaScript equivalents.
Main Results:
- Emscripten successfully compiled C/C++ chemoinformatics libraries for web deployment.
- The resulting JavaScript files exhibited comparable sizes to native programs.
- Performance benchmarks showed that Emscripten-compiled JavaScript code closely matched native code performance.
- The compiled JavaScript code significantly outperformed handwritten JavaScript solutions.
Conclusions:
- Emscripten is a practical and effective tool for porting C/C++ scientific software, particularly chemoinformatics tools, to the web.
- The compiler offers a viable solution for web-based scientific computing, preserving performance and code size efficiency.
- Emscripten facilitates the reuse of extensive existing C/C++ codebases in web applications, expanding their reach and utility.
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