My goal is to convert a C++ program in to a .pexe file in order to execute it later on a remote computer. The .pexe file will contain some mathematical formulas or functions to be calculated on a remote computer, so I’ll be basically using the computational power of the remote computer. For all this I’ll be using the nacl_sdk with the Pepper library and I will be grateful if someone could clarify some things for me:
Any suggestion will be appreciated.
From what I've tried it seems like you can't capture the stuff that your pexe writes to stdout - it just goes to the stdout of the browser (it took me hours to realize that it does go somewhere - I followed a bad tutorial that had me believe the pexes stdout was going to be posted to the javascript side and was wondering why it "did nothing").
I currently work on porting my stuff to .pexe also, and it turned out to be quite simple, but that has to do with the way I write my programs:
I write my (C++) programs such that all code-parts read inputs only from an std::istream
object and write their outputs to some std::ostream
object. Then I just pass std::cin
and std::cout
to the top-level call and can use the program interactively in the shell. But then I can easily swap out the top-level call to use an std::ifstream
and std::ofstream
to use the program for batch-processing (without pipes from cat
and redirecting to files, which can be troublesome under some circumstances).
Since I write my programs like that, I can just implement the message handler like
class foo : public pp::Instance {
... ctor, dtor,...
virtual void HandleMessage(const pp::Var& msg) override {
std::stringstream i, o;
i << msg.AsString();
toplevelCall(i,o);
PostMessage(o.str());
}
};
so the data I get from the browser is put into a stringstream, which the rest of the code can use for inputs. It gets another stringstream where the rest of the code can write its outputs to. And then I just send that output back to the browser. (Downside is you have to wait for the program to finish before you get to see the result - you could derive a class from ostream and have the << operator post to the browser directly... nacl should come with a class that does that - I don't know if it actually does...)
On the html/js side, you can then have a textarea
and a pre
(which I like to call stdin and stdout ;-) ) and a button which posts the content of the textarea to the pexe - And have an eventhandler that writes the messages from the pexe to the pre
like this
<embed id='pnacl' type='application/x-pnacl' src='manifest.nmf' width='0' height='0'/>
<textarea id="stdin">Type your input here...</textarea>
<pre id='stdout' width='80' height='25'></pre>
<script>
var pnacl = document.getElementById('pnacl');
var stdout = document.getElementById('stdout');
var stdin = document.getElementById('stdin');
pnacl.addEventListener('message', function(ev){stdout.textContent += ev.data;});
</script>
<button onclick="pnacl.postMessage(stdin.value);">Submit</button>
Congratulations! Your program now runs in the browser!
I am not through with porting my compilers, but it seems like this would even work for stuff that uses flex & bison (you only have to copy FlexLexer.h to the include directory of the pnacl sdk and ignore the warnings about the "register" storage location specifier :-)