A fast in-place interpreter for WebAssembly | Hacker News Reader

A fast in-place interpreter for WebAssembly

arxiv.org

29 pointsazhenley9 comments

Wizard: An advanced WebAssembly Engine for Research - https://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine

- [ ] SIMD? https://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine/search?q=simd

Wizard supports parsing and typechecking of SIMD instructions (passing all the spec tests for them) but no interpreter implementation yet, so it can't execute them. Help wanted :)

I don't understand how anyone could leave the job half-finished and compromise in this way: in these scenarios, almost all the legwork is done to also build a compiler, for those times when the interpreted code runs just right and is ready for production. Why are such interpreters never finished into a compiler?

This is a research paper, so I think the idea is to show it can be done and would be useful. Hopefully the teams actually building WebAssembly compilers will find it of interest.

Indeed, I am already building the next tier in Wizard, a baseline JIT, and factoring out the codegen to be shared by both interpreter and JIT. I'm in contact with several browser engine teams and the design might get adopted into them, as their priorities allow.

Thank you for writing this proof of concept paper. Do you think CMU is a school that enhanced your ability to do projects like this, or did you know how to do this before you went to CMU or did you learn crucial stuff to accomplish it there ?

I studied at Rice University under Ken Kennedy and it was a great place to learn about compilation techniques and processes. Corky Cartwright was also instrumental in learning about abstract datatypes especially in the Strachey-Scott formal views.

I am just starting out at CMU. Most of the work was done before I joined in January. I am hoping to teach students how to do this, beginning with a course in the fall on Virtual Machines and Managed Runtimes.

Except that a JIT is still not a compiler in the conventional sense. I am specifically referring to a program capable of generating and permanently storing machine code on stable storage.

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