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Monaco Editor VS Emscripten

Compare Monaco Editor VS Emscripten and see what are their differences

Monaco Editor logo Monaco Editor

A browser based code editor

Emscripten logo Emscripten

Emscripten is an LLVM to JavaScript compiler.
  • Monaco Editor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-23
  • Emscripten Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-08-02

Monaco Editor features and specs

  • Rich Features
    Monaco Editor provides a wide array of features like syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, code folding, etc., making it a powerful option for code editing.
  • Extensibility
    The editor is highly extensible, allowing developers to customize and extend its functionalities to suit their specific needs.
  • VS Code Integration
    As the core editor used in Visual Studio Code, Monaco Editor inherits many of the capabilities and optimizations from VS Code, ensuring robust performance.
  • Web-Based
    Being a web-based editor, it can be easily integrated into web applications, making it highly accessible across different platforms.
  • Large Community
    Monaco Editor benefits from a large community and strong backing from Microsoft, ensuring ongoing development and support.

Possible disadvantages of Monaco Editor

  • Large Bundle Size
    The initial bundle size of the Monaco Editor can be quite large, which may impact the loading time of web applications using it.
  • Complexity
    Due to its rich feature set, the Monaco Editor can be complex to integrate and configure for new developers.
  • Browser Limitations
    Since it is a web-based tool, it might face performance limitations or issues in specific browsers or older versions.
  • Limited Mobile Support
    Monaco Editor is not optimized for mobile usage, potentially leading to a subpar experience on mobile devices.

Emscripten features and specs

  • Cross-platform compatibility
    Emscripten enables developers to compile C and C++ code to WebAssembly or JavaScript, allowing the same codebase to run on multiple platforms, such as browsers and node.js, without needing additional platform-specific adaptations.
  • Leverage existing libraries
    Developers can utilize a vast ecosystem of existing C and C++ libraries by compiling them for the web, saving time and resources required for rewriting or finding alternatives developed in JavaScript.
  • Performance optimization
    Emscripten's compilation to WebAssembly provides near-native performance for web applications, making it suitable for compute-intensive tasks like gaming, simulations, and data processing.
  • Familiar toolchain
    Developers can use familiar tools like CMake and others as part of their Emscripten workflow, making it easier for those with C/C++ backgrounds to adapt and integrate into their web development processes.

Possible disadvantages of Emscripten

  • Steep learning curve
    Developers unfamiliar with C and C++ may find Emscripten challenging to use effectively, as it requires knowledge of these languages and their build systems to create and debug applications.
  • Limitations in browser environments
    Certain features of C/C++ may not translate directly to web environments due to browser sandboxing constraints, leading to potential issues with file I/O, threading, and other system-level operations.
  • Code size
    Compiled WebAssembly and JavaScript code can sometimes be large, potentially affecting load times and performance, especially on lower-end devices with restrictive bandwidth or processing capabilities.
  • Debugging complexity
    Debugging WebAssembly code can be more complex than traditional JavaScript, requiring specialized tooling and techniques to trace and fix issues effectively.

Monaco Editor videos

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Emscripten videos

Monster Madness Online (Emscripten Web Technology Overview)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Monaco Editor and Emscripten)
Text Editors
73 73%
27% 27
IDE
30 30%
70% 70
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Email Marketing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Monaco Editor might be a bit more popular than Emscripten. We know about 49 links to it since March 2021 and only 47 links to Emscripten. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Monaco Editor mentions (49)

  • Integrate VS Code editor in your project! Monaco Editor 🚀
    Monaco editor by Microsoft @monaco-editor/react Happy coding! 😃. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • An experiment in UI density created with Svelte
    VS Code Editor which is based on Electron, is really fast, even with large codebase & many open tabs. Their monaco engine (https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/) uses custom, virtual code processor that is optimized for surgically updating underlying DOM. It also uses WebGL + canvas rendering to show minimap of the file. Similar approach (custom virtual processor) is leveraged by Google docs/sheets. Canvas... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • A structured note-taking app for personal use
    Fyi, if you are ever looking for a fun project you might be able to implement this. The vscode editor source is available as a library https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • GIGO and VS-code: the Battle With Microsoft
    VScode uses the monaco-editor to display all editor screens in vscode including the markdown editor. A simple solution is to use the in built markdown file editor and call it a day. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • NPM workspace and vite - Read dependency build output (d.ts file)
    So lets say the project consists of two packages Lib and App in which Lib is a library and App is the frontend app which depends on Lib. Now I want to display a monaco powered code editor in App which has has access to all types of Lib. This means that I have to somehow read the *.d.ts file of Lib as a string to set it as "extra lib" for monaco. Source: over 1 year ago
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Emscripten mentions (47)

  • Ask HN: Qt style "Signals and Slots" based JavaScript UI library?
    The first thing that comes to mind is that Qt now has a WebAssembly port[1] using Emscripten[2], so depending on your use-case, you could possibly just run Qt on the Web platform and avoid the need for a JavaScript framework entirely. [1]: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/wasm.html [2]: https://emscripten.org. - Source: Hacker News / 13 days ago
  • Ask HN: Resources for Learning Graphics Programming
    Me and a friend build our own Graphics engines based on https://learnopengl.com I can highly recommend this to everyone who gets started with computer graphics. It is a lot of new information but not the most modern Graphics library, but the information will help you understand the field and pickup any other graphics library quicker. Once I had a small project up and running I started looking at... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Software Applications Incorporated
    Https://infinitemac.org, which is https://basilisk.cebix.net compiled for the web using https://emscripten.org. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How does one get started with unit testing?
    One place that I’ve found some real, open source unit tests to look at for an example is in the emsdk for emscripten: https://emscripten.org. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Playing with low-level memory in WebAssembly
    I am playing around with Emscipten which wraps around clang to compile C/C++ code in WASM binary and provide some glue-code API to embed WASM binary into JavaScript. Look into MDN Docs and Emscripten SDK to get started. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Monaco Editor and Emscripten, you can also consider the following products

VS Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft

WebAssembly - Application and Data, Languages & Frameworks, and Languages

CSS Scan - Instantly check or copy computed CSS from any element for only ~95$

GNU Compiler Collection - The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting...

CodePen - A front end web development playground.

Cheerp - Enterprise-grade C/C++ compiler for Web applications. Compiles to WASM/JavaScript