Garbage collection is not magic. It's a fairly simple (but byzantine) matter of tracking references, and allocating and freeing memory. Why would this be so much harder for WebAssembly? Why can't existing garbage collectors be compiled to WA?
Re:WAVM: standalone WebAssembly VM prototype
by chrisseaton on Monday June 06, 2016 @12:30PM
(#11848000)
> Why can't existing garbage collectors be compiled to WA?
Yes I think that's the idea.
Re:WAVM: standalone WebAssembly VM prototype
by sspiff on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:13AM
(#11853276)
Exactly. From what I've seen of WebAsm, you can request pages of memory using grow_memory. Upon this, you could implement a memory pool system to handle malloc and free. Using this, it is trivial to port existing GC's.
I don't understand why people moan about GC in WebAsm. WebAsm is a compiler target for lower level languages, not the JVM.
when that would be so easy, maybe. But especially on top of the browser restrictions that will be even harder.