Re:Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly
by TUSF on Thursday December 01, 2022 @08:34PM
(#33825615)
> I don't think WASM should/would unify the GC across memory models
WASM already has a GC proposal[0] which is already at the "Implementation stage"[1] so it looks like this IS going to happen, although it's uncertain if language runtimes like Go will actually make use of the feature, or what.
A glance of the overview and spec seems to indicate that WASM will provide some primitive data types, and any GC language can build their implementation on top of it. As I understand it, it's heavily based on Reference Types[3], which allows acting on host-provided types, and is already considered part of the spec [4]. It doesn't remove the need for the 5 different runtimes to have their own GC, but it lowers the bulk that the runtimes need to carry around, and offloads some of that onto the WASM runtime instead.
WASM already has a GC proposal[0] which is already at the "Implementation stage"[1] so it looks like this IS going to happen, although it's uncertain if language runtimes like Go will actually make use of the feature, or what.
[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Ove...
[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals
A glance of the overview and spec seems to indicate that WASM will provide some primitive data types, and any GC language can build their implementation on top of it. As I understand it, it's heavily based on Reference Types[3], which allows acting on host-provided types, and is already considered part of the spec [4]. It doesn't remove the need for the 5 different runtimes to have their own GC, but it lowers the bulk that the runtimes need to carry around, and offloads some of that onto the WASM runtime instead.
[3]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/reference-types/blob/master/p...
[4]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/blob/main/finished-...