[Vm-dev] tracking WebAssembly

[Ben Coman]

Found some recent WebAssembly articles that may impact issues previously
raised as impediments to Smalltalk-on-WebAssembly.
Do these indicate anything useful for the possibility of running
Squeak/Pharo on WebAssembly...

Calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly are finally fast
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/calls-between-javascript-and-webassembly-are-finally-fast-%F0%9F%8E%89/


WebAssembly architecture for Go
https://docs.google.com/document/d/131vjr4DH6JFnb-blm_uRdaC0_Nv3OUwjEY5qVCxCup4/preview#


>From WebAssembly Illustrated...
https://takenobu-hs.github.io/downloads/WebAssembly_illustrated.pdf
* Slide 16 - If Slang could directly output WebAssembly bytecode, I presume
the Interpreter lookup table could be modeled as a "call_indirect #n" of
functions compiled to a WebAssembly "Table"
* Slide 39-40 - I wonder if the Host environment being able to mutate the
Table means by default a newly downloaded Smalltalk program would be
running as an Interpreter, but you could a browser plugin for the JIT that
updated Table for JIT'd methods.
* Slides 48-51 - Alternatively, I wonder if a "form" of JITing could be
dynamically creating a WebAssembly bytecode module that is then immediately
loaded and the function called, and a new module loaded for each new JIT
output.
"Platform-independent JIT" is mentioned at
https://webassembly.org/docs/future-features/


WebAssembly GC proposal including a tagging scheme for unboxed small
scalars
https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/Overview.md


Garbage Collection (proposal)
https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc

cheers -ben
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