3 ms·

I have been genuinely intrigued by WASM and have hacked on my own VM in spare time. One thing that disappoints me is the arbitrary invention of a new binary for

I have been genuinely intrigued by WASM and have hacked on my own VM in spare time. One thing that disappoints me is the arbitrary invention of a new binary format for no apparent reason solving no apparent problems. It would be better to use CBOR, or at least ELF. The former, especially, is not too far from WASM's format (both favor compact integer representation), and bears semblance to JSON which bears semblance to JS which bears semblance to WASM. It only makes too much sense. But WASM didn't take that direction, so we don't benefit from a highly extensible, simple and elegant format with widespread support. I hope WASM fixes this soon.

monocasa 7y ago
I'm not sure ELF makes sense. ELF is all about the representation verbatim in memory, but at least for the executable segments, that's heavily abstracted for WASM. And describing alternate address spaces is always a hack in ELF, just see the craziness in AVR ELFs for an example.
htfy96 7y ago
Exactly. Especially when they are trying to add dynamic linking support at https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions/blob/master/DynamicLinking.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions/blob/master/... It seems that designers want to keep it simple, but it is inevitable to bring concepts like sections and symbol tables in when it comes to linking: https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions/blob/master/Linking.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions/blob/master/...