Re:Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime
by Rusky on Sunday March 31, 2019 @12:22PM
(#19536385)
Sure, and we use software memory tagging with things like LLVM sanitizers. It's great.
But a) the hardware Wasm needs to support doesn't have tagging, and b) the software equivalent requires support from the allocator and has a large performance penalty.
So yes, it was a deliberate design decision, taken in order to support existing C programs on the Web.
This is really getting tiring- learning from the past is great, but fetishizing it to the point of denying anything new has any value is... not.
Re:Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime
by Rusky on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @07:30PM
(#19559561)
Those "politics" were there for a reason. Wasm is a solid improvement over PNaCl, which I will note you have curiously left out of all your other old-VM-worship claims.
But a) the hardware Wasm needs to support doesn't have tagging, and b) the software equivalent requires support from the allocator and has a large performance penalty.
So yes, it was a deliberate design decision, taken in order to support existing C programs on the Web.
This is really getting tiring- learning from the past is great, but fetishizing it to the point of denying anything new has any value is... not.