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Re:Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla by jhallenworld on Monday October 26, 2020 @04:12PM (#24900783)
I wonder which leads to a faster emulated machine?
Re:Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla by FullyFunctional on Monday October 26, 2020 @06:01PM (#24902020)
Assuming the same implementation effort & skill: WASM, hands down (disclaimer: I have significant RISC-V experience and am an stout advocate, but RISC-V is a poor replacement for WASM).

ADD: a few of the reasons:

- When JITing RISC-V you cannot tell which are the last use of registers without a very expensive whole-graph analysis. Without that, you will have to generate more code than necessary.

- WASM's representation is very close to what you want in the compiler. In particular, you can directly tell all incoming control-flow edges, which makes analysis much more precise, gives optimization opportunities you would otherwise miss. Recreating this information from a binary is either impossible (due to computed branches) or expensive both in terms of analysis and the guards you have to generate to protect your assumptions.

Re:Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla by jacobush on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @03:51AM (#24905242)
Your comment made me idly wonder if there's a way to make an ISA which lends itself both to fast (even for low-gate implementations) hardware, and to fast JIT-ing.
Re:Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla by FullyFunctional on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @04:29AM (#24905430)
I suspect these are conflicting goals but an interesting question. My idle pondering are on ISAs that minimize the challenges in wide superscalar OoOE.