A high performance WebAssembly interpreter written in C.
∼ 15.8x faster than other wasm interpreters (wac
, life
, wasm-micro-runtime
)
∼ 4..5x slower than state of the art wasm JIT
engines (liftoff
, cranelift
)
∼ 11.5x slower than native execution
* Based on CoreMark 1.0 benchmark. Your mileage may vary.
Here's an online demo and a small getting started guide:
wasm3
passes the WebAssembly spec testsuite and is able to run many WASI
apps.
Minimum useful system requirements: ~64Kb for code and ~10Kb RAM
wasm3
runs on a wide range of platforms:
Linux,
Windows,
OS X
Android,
iOS
OpenWRT-enabled routers
Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi and other SBCs
MCUs:
Arduino MKR*, Arduino Due, Particle Photon,
ESP8266, ESP32, Air602 (W600), nRF52, nRF51,
Blue Pill (STM32F103C8T6), MXChip AZ3166 (EMW3166),
Maix (K210), HiFive1 (E310), Fomu (ICE40UP5K), ATmega1284 etc.Browsers... yes, using WebAssembly itself!
wasm3
can executewasm3
(self-hosting)
wasm3
is built on top of Steven Massey's novel interpreter topology, with:
- Wasm 1.0 spec conformance
WASI
support- Support of
x86
,x64
,ARM
,MIPS
,RISC-V
,Xtensa
architectures
Why using "slow interpreter", instead of "fast JIT"?
In many situations, speed is not the main concern. Runtime executable size, code density, memory usage, startup latency can be all improved with the interpreter approach. Portability and security are much easier to achieve and maintain. Also on some platforms (i.e. iOS and WebAssembly itself) you can't generate executable code pages in runtime, so JIT is unavailable.
Why would you want to run WASM on microcontrollers?
Wasm3 started as a research project and remains so by many means. Evaluating the engine in different environments is part of the research. Given that we have Lua, JS, Python, Lisp, (...) running on MCUs, WebAssembly is actually a promising alternative. It provides a completely sandboxed, well-defined and predictible environment. Among practical use cases, we can list edge computing, scripting, running IoT rules, blockchain contracts, etc.
See DEV.md
See test/README.md
See PERFORMANCE.md
This project is released under The MIT License (MIT)