Bytecode Alliance

In April of 2015, Luke Wagner made the first commits to a new repository called WebAssembly/design, adding a high-level design document for a “binary format to serve as a web compilation target.”

Function inlining is one of the most important compiler optimizations, not because of its direct effects, but because of the follow-up optimizations it unlocks. It may reveal, for example, that an otherwise-unknown function parameter value is bound to a constant argument, which makes a conditional branch unconditional, which in turn exposes that the function will always return the same value. Inlining is the catalyst of modern compiler optimization.

This is a blog post outlining the odyssey I recently took to implement the Wasm exception-handling proposal in Wasmtime, the open-source WebAssembly engine for which I’m a core team member/maintainer, and its Cranelift compiler backend.