Keeping the asm in Wasm – Running high-level languages on a low-level VM
summary
WebAssembly remains a low-level VM that intentionally exposes hardware-like costs and forbids unsafe access to registers, stack or self-modifying code, so language runtimes must implement features on top of Wasm. To make dynamic languages fast the proposal favors concrete mechanisms: dynamic module instantiation and first-class module references to let a runtime compile/specialize code at instantiation, an instruction to generate modules from memory for JITs, and optional access to hidden-class descriptors (maps/shapes) to implement inline caches and layouts; GC stays optional.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00WebAssembly intro
- 1:03What is WebAssembly
- 6:21WebAssembly as VM
- 9:52Low-level vs safety
- 14:08Dynamic languages on Wasm
- 18:22Future Wasm features
- 23:01JIT in WebAssembly
- 25:26Runtime optimizations
- 27:54Open questions
- 28:38Summary & Q&A
