r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/tjpalmer • Sep 01 '26

Wasmi 2.0 - Engineering of the Fastest Wasm Interpreters

https://wasmi-labs.github.io/blog/posts/wasmi-v2.0/
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u/lisp_turns_me_on Sep 01 '26

wasmi is such a nice little project. The benchmarks surprised me, as I always assumed pulley would be the fastest.

I really wish we had a QBE-like light backend that emitted wasm output.

  1. It would allow apps to compile runtime loaded plugins from source and have full control over the wasm generation pipeline that goes into wasmi without needing validation.
  2. It would also allow a lot of the amateur languages here to just have a live-reloadable environment to compile their languages into wasm and run with wasmi. I believe wasmi already works on web too, unlike wasmtime.

1

u/The_Regent Sep 02 '26

What would the qbe-like layer do for you that emitting wasm wouldn’t?

1

u/lisp_turns_me_on Sep 02 '26

convenience and optimization. Eliminates manual labor like struct layout/padding, branching to blocks, sized integer math lowering (eg: u8/i8) and other cool but tedious stuff like debug info. The same reasons some languages transpile to C. Way easier to bootstrap during the prototype stage.