Is Wasm Becoming Garbage? (Keynote)
summary
Wasm now includes a new garbage‑collection extension that preserves a low‑level, language‑neutral design while adding typed reference types, structs, arrays, an i31 scalar, opaque references stored in tables, and a separate GC heap; compilers for Java, Dart, Kotlin, OCaml and Scheme already target it and Google Sheets shows 1% chance in Chrome running GC in production. The proposal is GC extension finalized after six–seven years; runtime casts appear frequently and cost about 2–4% cast overhead; interior pointers and weak‑finalizer semantics remain unresolved.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:30WebAssembly beyond web and design
- 8:17Safety versus low-level goals
- 11:29Why WebAssembly needs garbage collection
- 16:08Wasm GC proposal principles
- 27:32Compiling classes and OOP
- 37:16Closures and generics handling
- 40:25Algebraic data types and pattern matching
- 45:06Polymorphic languages representation
- 49:42Wasm GC limitations and future
- 52:52Summary
- 53:13Q&A
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