Is Wasm Becoming Garbage? - WebAssembly and Garbage Collection

Explore the recent addition of garbage collection support to WebAssembly (Wasm) in this keynote presentation from the MPLR 2023 conference. Delve into the rationale behind this feature and learn how it maintains Wasm's low-level design philosophy. Discover how compilers for object-oriented and functional languages can target this new GC extension, and gain insights into potential future improvements. Presented by Andreas Rossberg, an independent researcher from Germany, this 57-minute talk examines the implications of bringing direct garbage collection support to a virtual machine designed to be lightweight, close to the metal, and language-agnostic.