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Re:Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly by zozbot234 on Thursday December 01, 2022 @11:00AM (#33818024)
> We're OK with the overheads we've measured so far but are always looking for mechanisms to reduce or eliminate these.

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.

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!