Hello again, For those following the development ...

# webassembly

[Charlie Tapping]

Hello again,

For those following the development of my web assembly runtime I’ve been building I have just pushed a release with wasm-gc support! Meaning we can finally interpret kotlin programs! I’ll likely follow up in the week with an example added to the repo to better show how the runtime could be integrated with existing software, but those who are curious you should be able to start hacking around with it yourselves by pulling the 0.2.0 artifact

Whats Next

This has been an enormous project which I’ve undertaken since the new year, in order to get this far I’ve had to be quite pragmatic and not focus on the finer details. Now that we are able to run kotlin programs I think its a good opportunity to take a breather and clean up the code, fix all the bugs (there will be a lot 😅) and stabilise the api so I can feel confident telling people they can use the software in production. A rough order of next steps :

• Automate and pass 100% the web assembly test suite (Indirectly this means module validation and adding a validation function
• Create a compiler plugin to make host function integration a little nicer
• Setup benchmarks so we can track performance over time
• Backfill any missing unit test coverage
Longer Term Goals

• WASI support (if no one builds it for me 👀 )
• Exception proposal once its reaches Stage 4 (You have to use a compiler flag currently to convert exceptions to traps)
• Threads proposal
• Multiple memory proposal
Please have a play around, file any bugs you find and let me know your thoughts

https://github.com/CharlieTap/chasm/

[bashor]

Congrats! Good job!

[bashor]

I think Exception proposal is quite stable now, likely it will be promoted to Phase 4.
We recently supported the latest version of EH in Kotlin compiler, but it’s under the flag.

[Charlie Tapping]

That will be awesome! does the promotion of proposals happen around certain dates in the year? I’d like to follow that news if possible?

[Arjan van Wieringen]

Wait, so that means I could possibly write a Kotlin wasm program that can run itself? 😁

Amazing work btw

[Charlie Tapping]

This means you can interpret any language that targets web assembly (so pretty much every language out there including Kotlin). Once it has WASI support and we can make syscalls you can practically take any library from any language and interface with it without the usual FFI ceremony 😬. Moreover you could do something like zipline from the gents at Square that allows you to dynamically update modules of code, avoiding app store releases, patching bugs in process etc

[bashor]

does the promotion of proposals happen around certain dates in the year?

No, it’s more like my prediction based on state of proposal and activities around 🙂

I’d like to follow that news if possible?

Well,
• you can join Wasm Community Group, and participate in meetings
• you can track meeting notes here https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/
• you can follow me 🙂 https://x.com/bashorov or WebAssembly community at x.com