Compiling lynx with cowasm

[sandkoan]

This seems like a really compelling idea. Recently, I've been trying to compile lynx to wasm, but have been running into issues with the ncurses library (which, it doesn't seem, emscripten has support for). After some searching, I found cowasm, which seems to have ncurses packages.

How would I go about compiling lynx to wasm using cowasm's ncurses?

[williamstein]

I haven't looked into lynx yet. However, probably the easiest way now would be to start with the rogue package here

https://github.com/sagemathinc/cowasm/tree/main/packages/rogue

which also uses ncurses. First ensure you can build it on your computer by typing "make".

Then copy packages/rogue to a new directory packages/lynx, make changes, and go from there.

I assume you're talking about the lynx web browser, in which case presumably networking will be the really interesting challenge. Where are you trying to run lynx?

[sandkoan]

I am indeed referring to the lynx web browser.

I'm trying to build a client-side version of text-mode: https://earthly.dev/blog/text-mode/, and for that I need to be able to run the lynx binary in the browser—hence the need to compile it to wasm.

I only plan to run lynx with the --dump flag, which doesn't even require the curses library, but I don't know how to extract the necessary non-curses parts, so I'm forced to compile the entire thing to wasm.

I'm following the steps outlined here.

[williamstein]

Will you need a TCP network stack for this? Or are you just browsing files via lynx?

[sandkoan]

I won't need a TCP network stack, because I expect to already have access to the underlying HTML/DOM, so it just becomes a matter of dumping/converting said HTML to raw plaintext, which is, really, the only thing I need lynx for.