• Salam Web Playground

  • How it works

  • Building the Wasm module

  • Running it

  • Trying the interpreter without the browser

  • Scope

Salam Web Playground¶

Run Salam entirely in the browser. Edit code, run it, and preview layout pages - powered by the Salam compiler compiled to WebAssembly plus a small text editor. Switching to فارسی flips the whole UI and the editor to true right-to-left (right-aligned, lines starting from the right); English is left-to-right. No server, no C toolchain in the browser.

The editor is a plain <textarea> precisely so it can be genuinely RTL in

How it works¶

The browser cannot run a C compiler, so general programs run through Salam’s tree-walking interpreter (src/interp) rather than the C-codegen backend. The whole frontend (lexer → parser → semantic analyzer) plus the interpreter and the layout engine are compiled to salam-wa.wasm/salam-wa.js with Emscripten and driven from JavaScript:

The editor (editor/app.js) is bilingual: switching English / فارسی updates both the UI strings and the document direction (ltr/rtl) in sync, and ships matching English and Persian sample programs.

Building the Wasm module¶

Requires the Emscripten SDK:

git clone https://github.com/emscripten-core/emsdk
cd emsdk && ./emsdk install latest && ./emsdk activate latest && . ./emsdk_env.sh
cd /path/to/Salam/compiler
sh tools/bash/build-wasm.sh # -> ../editor/salam-wa.js, ../editor/salam-wa.wasm, ../editor/salam-wa.data

build-wasm.sh preloads the std/ directory into the module’s virtual filesystem so import resolution and the layout schema work in the browser.

Running it¶

Serve the editor/ directory over HTTP (Wasm needs a real origin, not file://):

sh compiler/tools/bash/editor-serve.sh        # http://localhost:8080  (no rebuild for UI dev)
sh compiler/tools/bash/editor-serve.sh 9000   # ... on a custom port

Or serve it directly: cd editor && python -m http.server 8080.

If salam-wa.js is missing, the editor still loads and shows a banner telling you to run compiler/tools/bash/build-wasm.sh.

Trying the interpreter without the browser¶

The same interpreter runs natively:

salam exec examples/fa/types/07_struct.salam --lang=fa
salam run  --interp examples/en/apps/brainfuck.salam

Scope¶

The interpreter targets pure-compute programs (functions, structs, enums, arrays, Vector, HashMap, lambdas/closures, operator overloading, generics, defer, char/strings, control flow) in both English and Persian, and matches the C backend’s output across the example suite. It intentionally does not support things that need a real OS or the C ABI (file/socket/thread/HTTP/SQLite APIs, FFI/extern "C", and manual memory (salam_alloc)), none of which apply in a browser sandbox. The &ref scalar parameters, multi-file user imports, and the fully Persian-localized std API (ریاضی.جذر) are current limitations of the interpreter, not the language.