README.md

Grain Web Example

This repo contains an example of Grain wasm files running in a browser.

Setup

First, you'll need to install the Grain compiler by following the Getting Grain guide for your operating system.

Additionally, you'll need to install the project dependencies using:

npm install

The easiest way to compile your Grain files to WebAssembly is to use the built-in npm script:

npm run compile

This will compile hello.gr, another.gr, and the necessary stdlib dependencies.

Then, run a webserver in this directory. You can use our other npm script:

npm start

(This script will also compile your project before starting the webserver).

If you visit localhost:1337 and open your dev console, you should see the hello world messages appear.

index.html Breakdown

We first load the Grain browser runtime with this script tag:

<script src="node_modules/@grain/js-runner/dist/grain-runner-browser.js"></script>

Grain.buildGrainRunner takes a locator function as its argument. In this case, we just use the defaultURLLocator. As arguments, we pass the locations to look for wasm files—the current URL as the root, and the node_modules/@grain/stdlib subdirectory. The default locator will try to find wasm files by first looking in the root of this project, followed by the stdlib directory.

Once the GrainRunner is set up, we call GrainRunner.runURL with hello.wasm. The locator will then fetch hello.wasm, see that it depends on another.wasm and pervasives.wasm, and load those as well.