4 posts tagged with "tooling"

Introduction​

Thanks to recent work in Chrome and Emscripten, you can now use up to 4GB of memory in WebAssembly applications. That’s up from the previous limit of 2GB. It might seem odd that there was ever a limit - after all, no work was needed to allow people to use 512MB or 1GB of memory! - but it turns out that there are some special things happening in the jump from 2GB to 4GB, both in the browser and in the toolchain, which we’ll describe in this post.

We have a growing number of compilers and other tools that generate or manipulate .wasm files, and sometimes you might want to have a look inside. Maybe you’re a developer of such a tool, or more directly, you’re a programmer targeting Wasm, and wondering what the generated code looks like, for performance or other reasons.

Emscripten has always focused first and foremost on compiling to the Web and other JavaScript environments like Node.js. But as WebAssembly starts to be used without JavaScript, new use cases are appearing, and so we've been working on support for emitting standalone Wasm files from Emscripten, that do not depend on the Emscripten JS runtime! This post explains why that's interesting.

WebAssembly is normally compiled from a source language, which means that developers need tools to use it. Because of that, the V8 team works on relevant open-source projects like LLVM, Emscripten, Binaryen, and WABT. This post describes some of the work we’ve been doing on Emscripten and LLVM, which will soon allow Emscripten to switch to the LLVM WebAssembly backend by default — please test it and report any issues!