Note
I regret to inform the community that since my house was destroyed by russians who invaded my country, Wasm3 will enter a minimal maintenance phase. At this time, I am unable to continue the development of new features. However, I am committed to keeping the project alive and will actively review and merge incoming Pull Requests. I deeply appreciate your understanding and support during this difficult period. Your contributions to Wasm3 are now more valuable than ever.
A fast WebAssembly interpreter and the most universal WASM runtime.
See CoreMark 1.0 and independent benchmarks. Your mileage may vary.
Please follow the installation instructions.
Wasm3 can also be used as a library for:
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 architectures (x86 x86_64 ARM RISC-V PowerPC MIPS Xtensa ARC32 ...) and platforms:
Linux,
Windows,
OS X,
FreeBSD,
Android,
OpenWrt, Yocto, Buildroot (routers, modems, etc.)
Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi and other SBCs
MCUs: Arduino, ESP8266, ESP32, Particle, ... see full list
Browsers. Wasm3 can be compiled to WebAssembly itself!
wasm3can executewasm3(self-hosting)
| Status | Features |
|---|---|
| ⭐ Ready | Lime1: Import/Export of Mutable Globals Non-trapping float-to-int conversions Sign-extension operators Multi-value Extended constant expressions bulk-memory-opt call-indirect-overlong |
| ⭐ Ready | Proposals: Bulk memory operations Exception handling Multiple memories Memory64+Table64 Reference types Typed function references (partial) Tail call Custom page size Compact Import section Deterministic profile Stack switching Wide arithmetic Threads (atomics only) |
| ✨ Ready | Extra: Structured execution tracing Big-Endian support Gas metering Suspend/resume snapshots Wasm and WASI self-hosting Guard-page memories Linear memory limit (< 64KiB) Resource caps |
| ⛔ N/A | Garbage collection Threads Fixed-width SIMD |
Why use a "slow interpreter" versus a "fast JIT"?
In many situations, speed is not the main concern. Runtime executable size, memory usage, startup latency can be improved with the interpreter approach. Portability and security are much easier to achieve and maintain. Additionally, development impedance is much lower. A simple library like Wasm3 is easy to compile and integrate into an existing project. (Wasm3 builds in a just few seconds). Finally, 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 embedded devices?
Wasm3 started as a research project and remains so by any 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 a promising alternative. It provides toolchain decoupling as well as a completely sandboxed, well-defined, predictable environment. Among practical use cases we can list edge computing, scripting, plugin systems, running IoT rules, smart contracts, etc.
Demos
Installation instructions
Cookbook
Troubleshooting
Build and Development instructions
Supported Hardware
Testing & Fuzzing
Performance
AOT-compiling WASM into native embedded modules
Interpreter Architecture
Logging
Awesome WebAssembly Tools
This project is released under The MIT License (MIT)
