> There are plenty of CPU capabilities that languages don't exploit fully (e.g. most languages won't give you direct access to the carry flag) Sure they do: th

> There are plenty of CPU capabilities that languages don't exploit fully (e.g. most languages won't give you direct access to the carry flag) Sure they do: the carry flag is the > operator. > or only allow you to access via a specialized interface rather than making them a first-class part of the language (e.g. SIMD instructions). This seems entirely normal. So if you want to argue that unsigned multiplication/division should be encoded as a magic intrinsic (as Java 8 does) instead of as a primitive operation, then I still think it's a bit silly to make such common operations require such verbose encodings, but I could be convinced either way. > pointer arithmetic, not that one should be doing it at all The point of wasm is to be a compilation target for languages like C and C++. So pointer arithmetic is very important here.