SPLASH 2023
Sun 22 - Fri 27 October 2023 Cascais, Portugal
Tue 24 Oct 2023 14:30 - 15:00 at Room XV - The Future of Runtimes Chair(s): Juan Fumero

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a virtual machine whose defining characteristic is that it is low-level: Wasm is designed to abstract the hardware below, not language concepts above. This is a prerequisite for providing predictable performance and for avoiding language bias without feature creep. At the same time, it is a hard requirement that Wasm is safe and portable, which sometimes necessitates raising its abstraction level above the raw metal. Yet ultimately, the intention is that language runtimes are largely implemented on top of Wasm, in Wasm itself.

Dynamic languages pose a challenge for this model, because achieving acceptable performance for them often requires every dirty trick from the books. Not all of these techniques are easily ported to Wasm with some of its abstractions, or they incur higher cost because a Wasm engine cannot know or trust invariants in the higher-level runtime and may need to perform redundant checks to maintain its own safety. In particular, Wasm will need to supply additional mechanisms to efficiently support techniques like jit compilation or inline caches.

Tue 24 Oct

Displayed time zone: Lisbon change

14:00 - 15:30
The Future of RuntimesDLS at Room XV
Chair(s): Juan Fumero University of Manchester
14:00
30m
Talk
JITs are Nice, but Why Aren’t We Using Them?
DLS
Kevin Menard Shopify
14:30
30m
Talk
Keeping the asm in Wasm – Running high-level languages on a low-level VM
DLS
Andreas Rossberg Independent
15:00
30m
Talk
Language Runtimes for the New Cloud Era
DLS
Rodrigo Bruno INESC-ID - IST-ULisboa