You do need a JIT, but a simpler one, like AOT-on-demand, since it's very static compared to other formats. It's not that far from shipping LLVM IR, except it's

You do need a JIT, but a simpler one, like AOT-on-demand, since it's very static compared to other formats. It's not that far from shipping LLVM IR, except it's specified. As for the memory overhead, where have you seen that? To my knowledge the most problematic part there is that wasm currently doesn't offer any way to return memory to the OS. The point of sandboxing is that the space allocated to wasm is well delineated and there should be no way to access the rest of your memory from the inside. For stuff like plugins, that's very valuable compared to just providing a .so with absolutely 0 isolation, in addition to having to compile the .so/.dynlib for your specific OS and architecture beforehand.