A Transactions Extension for Web Assembly
summary
Design and prototype of a WebAssembly transactions extension adds transactional types such as tstruct, transactional arrays and transactional linear memory, plus type-based access permissions and cast ops like Tref.cast.read and Tref.cast.write. A complete OAML reference implementation exists with most tests passing; a higher-performance port into Ben Titzer’s engine implements the opcodes and JIT paths and is nearly complete. Validator-level typing removes many runtime checks and a Wasm-to-Wasm optimizer eliminates redundant casts and can coalesce short transactions.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:23Project overview
- 1:06Motivation for transactions
- 3:15Why WebAssembly
- 4:21Simple transactions extension
- 7:12ACID semantics
- 8:16Transactional scope
- 9:00Transactional memory
- 10:27Granularity and sets
- 11:11Heap access permissions
- 13:19Transactional structs example
- 15:07Design rationale
- 16:12Implementation status
- 18:40Q&A: undo and exceptions
- 20:48Q&A: optimizer improvements
- 21:52Closing remarks
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