// the find
sebmarkbage/ocamlrun-wasm
OCamlrun WebAssembly - OCaml Bytecode Interpreter in WASM
A 2017 experiment by Sebastian Markbåge that compiles the OCaml bytecode interpreter to WebAssembly via Emscripten, so you can run OCaml bytecode in the browser without going through js_of_ocaml. The README is honest about the tradeoffs. This is a proof-of-concept from the earliest days of WASM, not a production tool.
The core idea is sound: shipping a bytecode interpreter instead of AOT-compiled WASM avoids the upfront compile cost that hurt startup time in 2017-era browsers. The rationale for using OCaml's own GC rather than the JS GC is well-argued. Written by someone who clearly understood both the OCaml and WASM internals.
Nine years old and effectively abandoned — the WASM ecosystem it was designed around (Emscripten incoming SDK, Chrome Canary flags) no longer exists in this form. The OCaml-to-WASM story has moved on entirely; the official OCaml 5 WASM backend and wasm_of_ocaml make this approach obsolete. The repo is a single shell script and a toy example, never stripped down for real use as the README itself admits was needed. Stars are almost certainly from curiosity in 2017, not from anyone using this.