Re:Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly
by titzer on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:08AM
(#33818193)
> proof-carrying code within Wasm
That's a legitimately neat idea. There are couple of projects to improve safety of Wasm code using linear memory (such as RichWasm by Amal Ahmed and MSWasm by a number of folks at Stanford, UCSD, and CMU). Obviously unrestricted aliasing of the giant byte array that is memory makes this more difficult. I hope that Wasm GC can offer an abstraction base to express even more invariants. In some sense that will be a study in adding more powerful types and more powerful proof constructs that are either on the side or embedded in the code. So, exciting future directions!
You could encode arbitrary invariants by implementing verifiable proof-carrying code within Wasm. Then a wasm-to-native compiler could be designed to take advantage of such invariants in order to dispense with these overheads.