Inside the Wizard Research Engine - WebAssembly Innovations and Challenges

Explore the innovative Wizard Research Engine for WebAssembly in this 35-minute talk by Ben Titzer from Carnegie Mellon University. Delve into the potential of WebAssembly as a fast, portable low-level target competing with native code performance. Learn about Wasm's expanding applications beyond the web, including embedded systems, cloud and edge deployments, and blockchains. Discover upcoming Wasm features such as garbage-collected data, first-class functions, and stack switching, and their implications for programming language retargeting. Examine the challenges these advancements present and how they relate to managed runtimes. Gain insights into the Wizard engine's design for instrumentation, dynamic analysis, and VM experimentation, with a focus on its unique in-place interpreter and the resulting instrumentation capabilities.