Gag

Throughout humankind, from caveman, to philosophers, to scientists, the question of: How could one have enough computer resources to run two 4K videos streams and the latest AAA video-game on max settings while also having a web irc client running on the side? That's preposterous!

Not anymore! Introducing: a simple WebAssembly IRC client, finally you can manage your resources without dropping any frames!

Project

What is it?

This is an in-progress web socket IRC client written in C and compiled to WebAssembly, it's supposed to be single channel. Objectives as of now are configuring desired channel and nickname and having functionalities as far as receiving and sending messages.

How I ended up making this:

I really like streaming websites, I really dislike depending on other's services to stream. While programming my own forum with streaming capabilities using CPPCMS I encountered an issue, I couldn't find a simple web client, most of them use bouncers and gateways and honestly it seemed a bit overwhelming to use for something as simple as a one channel, send and receive message client on my website.

I turned this issue on a opportunity to learn WebAssembly using Emscripten.

What I hope to accomplish:

An IRC web client not unlike one seen on twitch, youtube and dlive.

How to get it running

IRC Server

For this project I was using inspIRCd with the following config file.

#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-     WEB SOCK CONF     -#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-
<module name="sha1">
<module name="websocket">
<websocket defaultmode="text">
<wsorigin allow="*">
<bind address="127.0.0.1" port="7002" hook="websocket">

Compiling

As of now the server is static, before compiling change the IP address to connect to on main.c's main main function

EmscriptenWebSocketCreateAttributes ws_attrs = {"ws://127.0.0.1:7002", NULL, EM_TRUE};

Compile with make

Testing

Run test.html on your browser and open console, as soon as you join a channel you can use the send button and text input to send messages to the IRC chat

Debug

If by any chance you get a CORS error then you'll have to explicitly enable CORS sharing, you can do that easly with this python script, now all you have to do is change on your test.html

<script src="./bin/wasm_irc.js">/*IMPORT*/</script>

to access your python server such as:

<script src="http:localhost:8000/bin/wasm_irc.js">/*IMPORT*/</script>

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TODO

In no particular order the next steps ares:

• Use arguments to connect to the server on webassembly, using argc and argv is simples but I'm not yet sure on how to set arguments on JS's Module call yet.
• Comment code.
• Build a better Makefile, right now it's a glorified static shell call.
• Refactor parser
  • such as no more need for parse_login.
  • maybe set fill's content to parse_irc.
  • take out emscripten_run_script out of parser, as it's supposed to only parse message into struct p_info, let all messages handling be made by onmessage or create another handler that responds if needed.
• Make a better user interface on html+js end(Good enough).
• Create simple test runs to facilitate future development

In no particular order what I wish to support in the future:

• Userlist
• Add direct messaging support, e.g: /pm @foo bar and message "bar" only showing on foo's chat.

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