Re:Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly
by ilyt on Thursday December 01, 2022 @04:22PM
(#33822963)
Probably better than no GC whatsoever. And not having to bring whole GC code with you is benefit enough
Re:Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly
by wtetzner on Thursday December 01, 2022 @04:51PM
(#33823396)
But the competition is compile-to-javascript, which has exactly the same problem. With WASM, you get to choose between using a generic, potentially sub-optimal GC, or having a larger payload and including a GC bundled with the application.
Different languages have different GCs that are designed to work with their semantics. Some languages use a flag bit to tell the runtime if a value is stack or heap (Go, Ocaml), some languages allocate almost everything and assume a lot of short lived objects (Java)...
How well will a generic WASM GC really work here?