7 ms·

hi, author here, ready to answer all your questions! (sorry for the delay, 2nd-chance post)

RugnirViking 14d ago
hey, I'm not super familliar with webassembly interpreters in general so id ask here: What's the usecase? like I guess edge, chrome etc already have their own interpreters for webassembly built in. do you aim to replace those and be bundled with them? Or is this for other browsers? or even just other apps (whats the usecase there as opposed to just native execution)
- pestatije 14d ago
  TFA's third paragraph: > Wasmi is an efficient and feature-rich WebAssembly (Wasm) interpreter. It is an excellent choice for IoT devices, plugin systems (Typst, Zellij, Josh), cloud hosts, smart contracts (Soroban, Ripple) and even for your lightweight game consoles (Firefly Zero).
- herobird 14d ago
  Wasmi does not directly compete with the large JIT engines such as Wasmtime and V8. Instead, Wasmi tries to fit perfectly into its niche. Its main purpose is that it is very easy to embed and provides great performance for those use-cases. As detailed in the article, Wasmi is already used a lot for plugin systems, as game engine, as engine for executing smart contracts, and even as engine to run apps in experimental operating systems that have native Wasm support. It is also useful for cloud hosts that do not trust their inputs but need fast startup times and deterministic execution. Furthermore, there are platforms such as iOS that outright forbid using JITs, so interpreters are the only option. Fun fact: Wasm interpreter usually can even be embedded into Wasm environments themselves by compiling them to Wasm. Wasmi ran inside Wasmtime when it was used at Parity Technologies. This allowed them to hot-patch the Wasm runtime (Wasmi) without downtime.
tdrz 14d ago
Can I use it to embed PGlite in an app and distribute it like that? ie not to dependend on the host JIT/interpreter
- herobird 13d ago
  If Wasmi supports all the Wasm proposals that you need for PGlite and if Wasmi supports all the WASI features you need (Wasmi only supported the standard WASI features without extensions), then Wasmi should work for your use-case. :) Wasmi itself can be compiled to WebAssembly.
roflcopter69 14d ago
Hi there! It's really great seeing someone putting in the work to make a WASM interpreter fast :) I'm very much interested in this because I want my game's scripting system to simply run WASM so I need a fast WASM interpreter because iOS forbids JIT and most gaming consoles allegedly do so as well. I know it's NDA gated so one has to be light on details, but have you heard about people using wasmi interpreter on one of the major gaming consoles? I could imagine how that also makes awesome modding possible, especially when being able to limit how many resources those mods are allowed to consume.
- herobird 14d ago
  I am not aware of any of the major gaming consoles uses Wasm or Wasmi in particular for their engine but I am sure they'd let us know if they ever used Wasm as execution model for all their games. What's more likely is that Wasm is used in some indie games for those major game consoles. I know of one game engine (Firefly-zero) and one game where Wasmi is used as game engine and plugin engine respectively. There likely are more, but that's what I know for a certain. I experimented with running Doom using Wasmi and it even works in the browser, thus in a double sandbox where Wasmi itself is compiled to Wasm: (references in the article) https://wasmi-labs.github.io/wasmi-doom/ https://wasmi-labs.github.io/wasmi-doom/
UncleEntity 14d ago
I've been poking at a C version of this (https://github.com/dan-eicher/javelina https://github.com/dan-eicher/javelina) which would be interesting to benchmark against as it does a similar tail-calling dispatch mechanism. Plus copy-and-patch JIT but that probably only works on x86-64 as that's the only place I've ever tested it. The main differences from a brief skim of TFA is mine doesn't have any fallback (so non-tail calls will blow up the C stack) and the function calls always go through the trampoline so the VM doesn't have to care if it's calling JIT or interpreted code which, I'm assuming, your function pointer embedding thing is designed to optimize away. And the JavaCard firewall algorithm would be an interesting non-spec addition to a wasm VM which is running code you really, really don't want to escape the sandbox. Something to look into for inspiration on the subject, perhaps? Not sure if there's any sort of proposal for sandboxing these things as I just took the spec file and implemented it using the dodgy weasels where it was mainly to see how far they've come with no real plan to use it for anything so kept it strictly to what the spec said a wasm interpreter needs to do. Anyhoo, didn't really realize there were so many different projects doing the same thing, kind of interesting, actually...
- herobird 13d ago
  Cool project! If you think that your Wasm interpreter is stable and kinda production ready enough, you might want to file a PR to the wasmi-benchmarks repo to add support for your Wasm runtime. Would certainly be another great addition to have it. This would allow comparing your engine to all the others.

hey, I'm not super familliar with webassembly interpreters in general so id ask here: What's the usecase? like I guess edge, chrome etc already have their own interpreters for webassembly built in. do you aim to replace those and be bundled with them? Or is this for other browsers? or even just other apps (whats the usecase there as opposed to just native execution)

pestatije 14d ago
TFA's third paragraph: > Wasmi is an efficient and feature-rich WebAssembly (Wasm) interpreter. It is an excellent choice for IoT devices, plugin systems (Typst, Zellij, Josh), cloud hosts, smart contracts (Soroban, Ripple) and even for your lightweight game consoles (Firefly Zero).
herobird 14d ago
Wasmi does not directly compete with the large JIT engines such as Wasmtime and V8. Instead, Wasmi tries to fit perfectly into its niche. Its main purpose is that it is very easy to embed and provides great performance for those use-cases. As detailed in the article, Wasmi is already used a lot for plugin systems, as game engine, as engine for executing smart contracts, and even as engine to run apps in experimental operating systems that have native Wasm support. It is also useful for cloud hosts that do not trust their inputs but need fast startup times and deterministic execution. Furthermore, there are platforms such as iOS that outright forbid using JITs, so interpreters are the only option. Fun fact: Wasm interpreter usually can even be embedded into Wasm environments themselves by compiling them to Wasm. Wasmi ran inside Wasmtime when it was used at Parity Technologies. This allowed them to hot-patch the Wasm runtime (Wasmi) without downtime.

tdrz 14d ago

Can I use it to embed PGlite in an app and distribute it like that? ie not to dependend on the host JIT/interpreter

herobird 13d ago
If Wasmi supports all the Wasm proposals that you need for PGlite and if Wasmi supports all the WASI features you need (Wasmi only supported the standard WASI features without extensions), then Wasmi should work for your use-case. :) Wasmi itself can be compiled to WebAssembly.

roflcopter69 14d ago

Hi there! It's really great seeing someone putting in the work to make a WASM interpreter fast :) I'm very much interested in this because I want my game's scripting system to simply run WASM so I need a fast WASM interpreter because iOS forbids JIT and most gaming consoles allegedly do so as well. I know it's NDA gated so one has to be light on details, but have you heard about people using wasmi interpreter on one of the major gaming consoles? I could imagine how that also makes awesome modding possible, especially when being able to limit how many resources those mods are allowed to consume.

herobird 14d ago
I am not aware of any of the major gaming consoles uses Wasm or Wasmi in particular for their engine but I am sure they'd let us know if they ever used Wasm as execution model for all their games. What's more likely is that Wasm is used in some indie games for those major game consoles. I know of one game engine (Firefly-zero) and one game where Wasmi is used as game engine and plugin engine respectively. There likely are more, but that's what I know for a certain. I experimented with running Doom using Wasmi and it even works in the browser, thus in a double sandbox where Wasmi itself is compiled to Wasm: (references in the article) https://wasmi-labs.github.io/wasmi-doom/ https://wasmi-labs.github.io/wasmi-doom/

UncleEntity 14d ago

I've been poking at a C version of this (https://github.com/dan-eicher/javelina https://github.com/dan-eicher/javelina) which would be interesting to benchmark against as it does a similar tail-calling dispatch mechanism. Plus copy-and-patch JIT but that probably only works on x86-64 as that's the only place I've ever tested it. The main differences from a brief skim of TFA is mine doesn't have any fallback (so non-tail calls will blow up the C stack) and the function calls always go through the trampoline so the VM doesn't have to care if it's calling JIT or interpreted code which, I'm assuming, your function pointer embedding thing is designed to optimize away. And the JavaCard firewall algorithm would be an interesting non-spec addition to a wasm VM which is running code you really, really don't want to escape the sandbox. Something to look into for inspiration on the subject, perhaps? Not sure if there's any sort of proposal for sandboxing these things as I just took the spec file and implemented it using the dodgy weasels where it was mainly to see how far they've come with no real plan to use it for anything so kept it strictly to what the spec said a wasm interpreter needs to do. Anyhoo, didn't really realize there were so many different projects doing the same thing, kind of interesting, actually...

herobird 13d ago
Cool project! If you think that your Wasm interpreter is stable and kinda production ready enough, you might want to file a PR to the wasmi-benchmarks repo to add support for your Wasm runtime. Would certainly be another great addition to have it. This would allow comparing your engine to all the others.