3 ms·

Very interesting! They say they went from a stack-based IR, which provided faster translation but slow execution time to a register-based one, which has slightl

Very interesting! They say they went from a stack-based IR, which provided faster translation but slow execution time to a register-based one, which has slightly slower translations, but faster execution time. This in contrast with other runtimes which provide much slower translation times but very fast execution time via JIT. I assume that for very short-lived programs, a stack based interpreter could be faster. And for long-lived programs, a JIT would be better. This new IR seems to be targeting a sweet spot of short, but not super short lived programs. Also, it's a great alternative for environments where JIT is not possible. I'm happy to see all these alternatives in the Wasm world! It's really cool. And thanks for sharing!

herobird 2y ago
Thank you, that's a good summary of the article! Even faster startup times can be achieved by so-called in-place interpreters that do not even translate the Wasm binary at all and instead directly execute it without adjustments. Obviously this is slower at execution compared to re-writing interpreters. Examples for Wasm in-place interpreters are toywasm (https://github.com/yamt/toywasm https://github.com/yamt/toywasm) or WAMR's classic interpreter.
- titzer 2y ago
  There is also this (https://github.com/mbbill/Silverfir https://github.com/mbbill/Silverfir) and Wizard (https://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine https://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine). I wrote a paper about Wizard's in-place interpreter and benchmarked lots of runtimes in (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3563311 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3563311). As there seem to be even more runtimes popping up (great job with wasmi, btw), it seems like a fun, maybe even full-time, job to keep up with them all.
  - herobird 2y ago
    Also great job on Wizard btw! Your article about Wizard was a really interesting read to me. The abundance of Wasm runtimes is a testimony of how great the WebAssembly standard really is!

herobird 2y ago

Thank you, that's a good summary of the article! Even faster startup times can be achieved by so-called in-place interpreters that do not even translate the Wasm binary at all and instead directly execute it without adjustments. Obviously this is slower at execution compared to re-writing interpreters. Examples for Wasm in-place interpreters are toywasm (https://github.com/yamt/toywasm https://github.com/yamt/toywasm) or WAMR's classic interpreter.

titzer 2y ago
There is also this (https://github.com/mbbill/Silverfir https://github.com/mbbill/Silverfir) and Wizard (https://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine https://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine). I wrote a paper about Wizard's in-place interpreter and benchmarked lots of runtimes in (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3563311 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3563311). As there seem to be even more runtimes popping up (great job with wasmi, btw), it seems like a fun, maybe even full-time, job to keep up with them all.
- herobird 2y ago
  Also great job on Wizard btw! Your article about Wizard was a really interesting read to me. The abundance of Wasm runtimes is a testimony of how great the WebAssembly standard really is!