Talk: 10:15-11:00 (English)
A world to win: WebAssembly for the rest of us
WebAssembly has been around for a while, but until now it has been of limited utility for high-level languages, especially those that use garbage collection. Things are about to change, though, as web browsers are about to ship support for managed memory, making WebAssembly a viable target for Scheme, OCaml, and in general everyone who is not C++ or Rust. This talk will recap why it is that the 1.0 version of WebAssembly wasn’t a great target for e.g. Scheme, what the workarounds were, what the new facilities are, how implementations will be able to take advantage of them, and what limitations remain. In 2-3 years it’s reasonable to expect that WebAssembly will be an excellent compilation target and language run-time substrate for many of our dearest languages, but it’s up to us to make it there.
Andy Wingo
Andy is a virtual machine engineer with broad experience across the technology stack, from adaptive optimization to standard libraries to garbage collectors. Though he mostly works on JavaScript and WebAssembly implementations (V8, SpiderMonkey, etc) these days, he has a soft spot for Scheme, and continues to putter away on Guile when he can find time.
- Slides
- wingo.pdf
