Inside the Wizard Research Engine - Ben Titzer, Carnegie Mellon University

Inside the Wizard Research Engine - Ben Titzer, Carnegie Mellon University
WebAssembly offers the hope of a fast, portable low-level target that competes with native code performance, but without many of the drawbacks of native code. Born in the Web, Wasm now runs in many contexts, such as embedded systems, cloud and edge deployments, and blockchains. With new features coming to Wasm that add garbage-collected data, first-class functions, and stack switching, it offers the tantalizing opportunity to retarget many programming languages for greater safety and portability. Yet these new features offer new challenges, and some of the same challenges facing managed runtimes. In this talk, I will outline my work on a new Wasm engine, Wizard, designed for instrumentation, dynamic analysis, and experimentation in VM design. In particular, I’ll cover its innovative in-place interpreter and the instrumentation capabilities that unlocks.