CppCon, online 2021

October 2021 was the second time think-cell was invited to present its talk at the biggest and most well-known conference within C++ community — CppCon. This time, our Senior Software Developer Sebastian talked about "Typescripten — Generating type-safe JavaScript bindings for emscripten".

There he presented our new tool typescripten https://github.com/think-cell/typescripten for the first time at a conference. typescripten solves an important issue that we used to have when building web applications in C++: So far, there was no type-safe way to call JavaScript APIs from C++. Now there is. typescripten is built on emscripten and TypeScript. emscripten provides powerful runtime support that lets us call JavaScript from C++ but without type safety. TypeScript lets us annotate JavaScript libraries with type information. Such interface descriptions are available for over 7000 JavaScript libraries at https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped. Typescripten uses these TypeScript interface definitions and transforms them into type-safe C++ interfaces that every developer can include in their WebAssembly application.

Despite it being an online talk, due to current COVID-19 restrictions, it was both an honor and great pleasure for Sebastian to meet the audience. Participants were very engaged and had a lot of questions about our typescripten compiler. As the discussion exceeded the allotted Q&A time, there was an extra meeting afterwards, gather.town, which we was a great success!