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Is WebAssembly Memory64 worth using?

by bvisness on 1/16/25, 2:36 AM with 51 comments

• by yuri91 on 1/16/25, 8:28 AM

  Looking forward to progress on the memory control proposal(s). Another reason to want more than 4GB of memory is to have more address space, assuming that you have the ability to map it. With that capability Wasm64 could be useful also for apps that don't plan to use a huge amount for real.

• by delifue on 1/16/25, 2:52 AM

  ARM already have a special instruction `FJCVTZS` to accelerate JavaScript. If WebAssembly gets popular enough there will probably be hardware acceleration for it.

  https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architecture...

  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chip...

• by TekMol on 1/16/25, 6:38 AM

  The reason I don't use WebAssembly is that browsers do not support the text format.

  Often it is just a tiny loop that one wants to optimize. Writing it manually in WAT would be nice. But adding a whole toolchain and a compile step to the stack is not worth it.

  Shouldn't it be straight forward to compile WAT to WASM? I hope one day browsers will support it.

• by rvz on 1/16/25, 7:09 AM

  Unless you want to install a crypto miner to run locally on someone's machine when they visit a website.

  Now possible with this as well as even more capable closed-source untrusted binary blobs with DRM running amock on your machine.

  Mozilla (a member part of the W3C) and was supposed to stop such DRM-like software from reaching the web. They have proven to be powerless to allow such software like this to be approved as a web standard.

  The ones cheering WASM are the ones who absolutely love DRM and malware blobs in your machine now accessible in the browser.

  This is a massive failure of the so-called "Open Web".

• by InkCanon on 1/16/25, 7:14 AM

  "How do browsers take advantage of this fact? By reserving 4GB of memory for every single WebAssembly module."

  Does reserve mean it has exclusive access to? Because it can't possibly be that every single wasm module takes 4GB!

• by mwkaufma on 1/16/25, 6:20 AM

  Love to visit untrusted websites that feel entitled to over 4gb ram without asking.

• by flohofwoe on 1/16/25, 7:44 AM

  TL;DR: no, unless you actually need more than 32-bit address range. The other advantages of 64-bit CPUs (e.g. 64-bit integer registers, more general purpose registers) are already taken advantage of by wasm32.