gc VS wasm3

It may take some time for WasmGC to be usable by .NET. Based on the discussions the first version of WasmGC does not have a good way to handle a few .NET specific scenarios, and said scenarios are "post-post-mvp". [0]

My concern, of course, is that there is not much incentive for those features to be added if .NET is the only platform that needs them... at that point having a form of 'include' (to where a specific GC version can just be cached and loaded by another WASM assembly) would be more useful, despite the pain it would create.

[0] - https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77

Yes, that's definitely true: a single GC will not be optimal for everything, or even possible. Atm interior pointers are not supported at all, for example, but they are on the roadmap for later:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Pos...

What launched now is enough WasmGC to support a big and useful set of languages (Java, Kotlin, Dart, OCaml, Scheme), but a lot more work will be required here!

GC proposal is from 2018: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16 and there’s code: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...

Seems like an awefully long time for progress to be made, given all the possibilities it would unlock.

First is the size. Writing a server-side and client-side program is possible with Rust, and the resulting WASM package will be small enough. At the same time, Microsoft Blazor converts C# code to WASM, but the client delivery has to include the reduced .NET runtime, taking several megabytes for a script. The same is true for GoLang, even with an attempt to reduce the runtime delivery in TinyGo WASM. Developers want to work with their favorite languages, whether it is Java, Kotlin, Dart, C#, F#, Swift, Ruby, Python, C, C++, GoLang, or Rust. These languages produce groups of runtimes. For example, JVM and .NET have many common parts, Ruby and Python are dynamically interpreted at runtime, and all mentioned depend on automatic garbage collection. For smaller WASM packages, browser vendors can include extended runtime implementations, for example, by delivering a general garbage collector as part of WASM. Garbage collection support by WASM is currently in progress: WASM GC, .NET WASM Notes.

My understanding is that the main limitation is technical. WASM doens't do GC or the host system calling conventions and cannot interact directly with object from Javascript because of this. However, this is being worked[0] on and will be solved eventually. Even without this the performance overhead of bridging to JS is low enough that WASM frameworks can beat out React.

0: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Ove...

I’ve just watched a video on YouTube from Google I/O 2023 on Flutter for the web. Kevin Moore explains that Flutter can compile to Wasm, but now that GC support has been added to the standard and WasmGC is supported in Chromium and Firefox, I’m quite intrigued.

I have found the main thread about using WebAssembly GC in C#: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77. If I understand it correctly, it is not possible to use the current prototype version of GC in C#.

The .net team has given their notes on it, the concern is more on the memory layout from what I remember. Though it may be possible still. The runtime would likely still ship some gc code, but only a subset for cases not supported by the wasm gc itself and a few more for interfacing with the gc service, which overall should still result on smaller payloads compared to current sizes.

I assume that's one of the parts of the work done at https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc - not happening any soon yet, but it'll eventually be done.

As long as this is happening, might as well try some of my favorites: https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3, https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt, https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime

This means that newly created wasm blobs will stop being able to run in wasm3.

On a side note, I can't help feeling sorry for the people that advocate for C over C++ when I see commits like https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3/commit/121575febe8aa1b544fbcb...

It can, wasm3 is a wasm interpretor ported to a lot of bare metal microcontrollers: https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3

On other benchmarks I'm seeing numbers closer to 20% slower, e.g. https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3/blob/main/docs/Performance.md and https://github.com/second-state/wasm32-wasi-benchmark. It's numerical code, which is the best case scenario for a native binary. It's much closer on an average web app or server workload, e.g. https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.html - you can find WASM frameworks that beat most JS frameworks on there, but that is not as impressive considering the state of the JS ecosystem. Overall, it's already under 50%, and there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Can miniwasm share memory with the host? wasm3 doesn't allow this[1] and requires you to allocate VM memory and pass it to the host, but that has several downsides (some buffers come from external sources so this requires a memcpy; the VM memory location isn't stable so you can't store a pointer to it on the host; etc.).

I'm really interested in a fast interpreter-only Wasm VM that can allow the host to share some of its memory with the VM.

[1]: https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3/issues/114

> This product family will never run Linux, as developers will need to develop a new firmware from scratch. This is obviously not a problem for the earbuds, but a big limitation for the player

Perhaps not Linux, but I suspect there would be a place here for a Unix-like platform that feels familiar. If for example we could get wide-adoption of something like the JVM or wasm3 [0] on these platforms, code could become quite portable, despite wildly different architectures.

For example, Apache's NuttX [1] (that I first learned from Lupyuen, a guy making great progress working with Pine64 products).

> Processing wise, this chip is well sufficient for TWS headphones, but very inadequate for an audio player. It will not drive a good screen, it nor run high-resolution flacs or (probably?) support a high-quality, high-bandwidth codec. In fact, a first generation iPod Nano (retailing for $149 in 2006) had 16MB RAM, so over 16 times what the PinePod would offer. In fact, even the features of any custom firmware are limited from so little memory

I wouldn't call it time just yet. Displays can be interacted with intelligently (to reduce pixel bandwidth) and ultra high quality audio codecs offer diminishing returns, especially when you don't have a DAC or headphones to make the most of them.

My advice to Pine64 would be this:

1. Consolidate your product lines. The Pinebook is just a slower Pinebook Pro, just go with the Pinebook Pro. The PineTab is just a Pinebook without the keyboard, again I would consolidate this with the Pinebook Pro and just make the keyboard detachable.

2. The SBCs should just go straight into the device, thus creating a clear upgrade path for future products. If you want a PineBook Pro running Quartz, just swap the boards (of course with daughter boards for USB expansion, display driver, power, etc).

3. Don't be afraid to kill off products. The Pinebook and PineTab have never seen a new release. The PinePhone appears to be taking a back seat to the PinePhone Pro. The PineCube is basically DoA due to the processing power struggling to process the camera image.

More generally, try to do fewer things, but do them well.

[0] https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3

[1] https://nuttx.apache.org/docs/latest/

[2] https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/sensor

I think SIMD was a distraction to our conversation, most code doesn't use it and in the future the length agnostic, flexible vectors; https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors/blob/master/... are a better solution. They are a lot like RVV; https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec, research around vector processing is why RISC-V exists in the first place!

I was trying to find the smallest Rust Wasm interpreters I could find, I should have read the source first, I only really use wasmtime, but this one looks very interesting, zero deps, zero unsafe.

16.5kloc of Rust https://github.com/rhysd/wain

The most complete wasm env for small devices is wasm3

20kloc of C https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3

I get what you are saying as to be so small that there isn't a place of bugs to hide.

> “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” CAR Hoare

Even a 100 line program can't be guaranteed to be free of bugs. These programs need embedded tests to ensure that the layer below them is functioning as intended. They cannot and should not run open loop. Speaking of 300+ reimplementations, I am sure that RISC-V has already exceeded that. The smallest readable implementation is like 200 lines of code; https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/blob/master/FemtoRV/...

I don't think Wasm suffers from the base extension issue you bring up. It will get larger, but 1.0 has the right algebraic properties to be useful forever. Wasm does require an environment, for archival purposes that environment should be written in Wasm, with api for instantiating more envs passed into the first env. There are two solutions to the Wasm generating and calling Wasm problem. First would be a trampoline, where one returns Wasm from the first Wasm program which is then re-instantiated by the outer env. The other would be to pass in the api to create new Wasm envs over existing memory buffers.

See, https://copy.sh/v86/

MS-DOS, NES or C64 are useful for archival purposes because they are dead, frozen in time along with a large corpus of software. But there is a ton of complexity in implementing those systems with enough fidelity to run software.

Lua, Typed Assembly; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typed_assembly_language and Sector Lisp; https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp seem to have the right minimalism and compactness for archival purposes. Maybe it is sectorlisp+rv32+wasm.

If there are directions you would like Wasm to go, I really recommend attending the Wasm CG meetings.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings

When it comes to an archival system, I'd like it to be able to run anything from an era, not just specially crafted binaries. I think Wasm meets that goal.

https://gist.github.com/dabeaz/7d8838b54dba5006c58a40fc28da9...

It allows WebAssembly to be programs which are run using a runtime on the command line, like Wasmtime, Wasmer, Wasm3, etc. Sometimes, you want to have a program which acts like a server, in that it can receive connections and send responses. This is what the patch for Tokio does.