wasm-snake VS Web49

All of the game graphics, state and logic are written in WebAssembly Text. The host environment (Javascript) is responsible for:

Game tick loop

User input

Providing characters "0123456789GAMEOVER" byte data on game startup

Blitting the pixel buffer to the display with WebGL2

The game uses 3 virtual pages of memory (64kb each) for a total of 192kb. Within those exist the pixel buffer contents, the characters data and snake positions. For more detailed breakdown you can check src/snake.wat.

The memory is shared between WASM and JS. On each game tick, the pixel buffer region of the memory is transferred to a WebGL2 texture, uploaded to the GPU and blitted to the screen.

For more info you can refer to the repo - https://github.com/gnikoloff/wasm-snake

> I developed a unique way to write interpreters based on threaded code jumps and basic block versioning when I made MiniVM (https://github.com/FastVM/minivm). It was both larger and more dynamic than WebAssembly.

I'd be very interested to read more about this. It looks like you are using "one big function" with computed goto (https://github.com/FastVM/Web49/blob/main/src/interp/interp....). My experience working on this problem led me to the same conclusion as Mike Pall, which is that compilers do not do well with this pattern (particularly when it comes to register allocation): http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg00742.html

I'm curious how you worked around the problem of poor register allocation in the compiler. I've come to the conclusion that tail calls are the best solution to this problem: https://blog.reverberate.org/2021/04/21/musttail-efficient-i...