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Wasm/k: delimited continuations for WebAssembly

Authors:

Donald Pinckney,

Yuriy BrunAuthors Info & Claims

DLS 2020: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages

Pages 16 - 28

https://doi.org/10.1145/3426422.3426978

Published: 15 November 2020 Publication History

Abstract

WebAssembly is designed to be an alternative to JavaScript that is a safe, portable, and efficient compilation target for a variety of languages. The performance of high-level languages depends not only on the underlying performance of WebAssembly, but also on the quality of the generated WebAssembly code. In this paper, we identify several features of high-level languages that current approaches can only compile to WebAssembly by generating complex and inefficient code. We argue that these problems could be addressed if WebAssembly natively supported first-class continuations. We then present Wasm/k, which extends WebAssembly with delimited continuations. Wasm/k introduces no new value types, and thus does not require significant changes to the WebAssembly type system (validation). Wasm/k is safe, even in the presence of foreign function calls (e.g., to and from JavaScript). Finally, Wasm/k is amenable to efficient implementation: we implement Wasm/k as a local change to Wasmtime, an existing WebAssembly JIT. We evaluate Wasm/k by implementing C/k, which adds delimited continuations to C/C++. C/k uses Emscripten and its implementation serves as a case study on how to use Wasm/k in a compiler that targets WebAssembly. We present several case studies using C/k, and show that on implementing green threads, it can outperform the state-of-the-art approach Asyncify with an 18% improvement in performance and a 30% improvement in code size.

Supplementary Material

Auxiliary Presentation Video (dls20main-p5-p-video.mp4)

WebAssembly is designed to be an alternative to JavaScript that is a safe, portable, and efficient compilation target for a variety of languages. The performance of high-level languages depends not only on the underlying performance of WebAssembly, but also on the quality of the generated WebAssembly code. In this paper, we identify several features of high-level languages that current approaches can only compile to WebAssembly by generating complex and inefficient code. We argue that these problems could be addressed if WebAssembly natively supported first-class continuations. We then present Wasm/k, which extends WebAssembly with delimited continuations. Wasm/k is safe, even in the presence of foreign function calls (e.g., to and from JavaScript), and is amenable to efficient implementation in a JIT runtime. We evaluate Wasm/k by implementing C/k, an extension to C/C++ adding delimited continuations and compied to Wasm/k, and several case studies embedded in C/k.

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Donald Pinckney, Arjun Guha, and Yuriy Brun. 2020. Wasm/k: Delimited Continuations for WebAssembly. htps://arxiv.org/abs/ 2010.01723

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Digital Library

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Cited By

Titzer BGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)Whose Baseline Compiler Is It Anyway?Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444855(207-220)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444855
Toufie ZKabaso B(2024)Os noise mitigations for benchmarking web browser execution environment performanceDiscover Computing10.1007/s10791-024-09471-427:1Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10791-024-09471-4
Phipps-Costin LRossberg AGuha ALeijen DHillerström DSivaramakrishnan KPretnar MLindley S(2023)Continuing WebAssembly with Effect HandlersProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228147:OOPSLA2(460-485)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622814
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Wasm/k: delimited continuations for WebAssembly
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Coroutines

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DLS 2020: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages

November 2020

125 pages

ISBN:9781450381758

DOI:10.1145/3426422

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 November 2020

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SPLASH '20

SPLASH '20: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications, Software for Humanity

November 17, 2020

Virtual, USA

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Cited By

Titzer BGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)Whose Baseline Compiler Is It Anyway?Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444855(207-220)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444855
Toufie ZKabaso B(2024)Os noise mitigations for benchmarking web browser execution environment performanceDiscover Computing10.1007/s10791-024-09471-427:1Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10791-024-09471-4
Phipps-Costin LRossberg AGuha ALeijen DHillerström DSivaramakrishnan KPretnar MLindley S(2023)Continuing WebAssembly with Effect HandlersProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228147:OOPSLA2(460-485)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622814
Stiévenart QBinkley DDe Roover C(2023)Dynamic Slicing of WebAssembly Binaries2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME58846.2023.00020(84-96)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME58846.2023.00020
Stiévenart QBinkley DDe Roover CDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)Static stack-preserving intra-procedural slicing of webassembly binariesProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510070(2031-2042)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510003.3510070

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