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Computer Science > Programming Languages

arXiv:2308.08347 (cs)
[Submitted on 16 Aug 2023]

Title:Continuing WebAssembly with Effect Handlers

Authors:Luna Phipps-Costin, Andreas Rossberg, Arjun Guha, Daan Leijen
, Daniel Hillerstrom, KC Sivaramakrishnan, Sam Lindley
Download a PDF of the paper titled Continuing WebAssembly with Effect
Handlers, by Luna Phipps-Costin and 6 other authors
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    Abstract: WebAssembly (Wasm) is a low-level portable code format
    offering near native performance. It is intended as a compilation
    target for a wide variety of source languages. However, Wasm
    provides no direct support for non-local control flow features
    such as async/await, generators/iterators, lightweight threads,
    first-class continuations, etc. This means that compilers for
    source languages with such features must ceremoniously transform
    whole source programs in order to target Wasm. We present WasmFX,
    an extension to Wasm which provides a universal target for
    non-local control features via effect handlers, enabling
    compilers to translate such features directly into Wasm. Our
    extension is minimal and only adds three main instructions for
    creating, suspending, and resuming continuations. Moreover, our
    primitive instructions are type-safe providing typed
    continuations which are well-aligned with the design principles
    of Wasm whose stacks are typed. We present a formal specification
    of WasmFX and show that the extension is sound. We have
    implemented WasmFX as an extension to the Wasm reference
    interpreter and also built a prototype WasmFX extension for
    Wasmtime, a production-grade Wasm engine, piggybacking on
    Wasmtime's existing fibers API. The preliminary performance
    results for our prototype are encouraging, and we outline future
    plans to realise a native implementation

Subjects: Programming Languages (cs.PL)
Cite as:  arXiv:2308.08347 [cs.PL]
          (or arXiv:2308.08347v1 [cs.PL] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.08347
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Daniel Hillerstrom [view email]
[v1] Wed, 16 Aug 2023 13:15:33 UTC (99 KB)
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