I made Web49 because there are not many good tools for WebAssembly out there. WABT is close, but the interpreter is too slow and the tools megabytes in size each. Wasm3 is a bit faster but only contains an interpreter, nothing else.
Tooling for WebAssembly is held mostly by the browser vendors. It is such a nice format to work with when one removes all the fluff. WebAssembly tooling should not take seconds to do what should take milliseconds, and it should be able to be used as a library, not just a command line program.
I developed a unique way to write interpreters based on threaded code jumps and basic block versioning when I made MiniVM (https://github.com/FastVM/minivm). It was both larger and more dynamic than WebAssembly. Web49 started as a way to compile WebAssembly to MiniVM, but soon pivoted into its own Interpreter and tooling. I could not be happier with it in its current form and am excited to see what else It can do, with more work.
Tooling for WebAssembly is held mostly by the browser vendors. It is such a nice format to work with when one removes all the fluff. WebAssembly tooling should not take seconds to do what should take milliseconds, and it should be able to be used as a library, not just a command line program.
I developed a unique way to write interpreters based on threaded code jumps and basic block versioning when I made MiniVM (https://github.com/FastVM/minivm). It was both larger and more dynamic than WebAssembly. Web49 started as a way to compile WebAssembly to MiniVM, but soon pivoted into its own Interpreter and tooling. I could not be happier with it in its current form and am excited to see what else It can do, with more work.