I'm a bit skeptical about this. This is significantly increasing WebAssembly's complexity.
Garbage collectors are a leaky abstraction: Some support interior pointers, others don't. Some support parallel tasks sharing memory, others don't. Some require compaction, making C FFI more difficult, others don't. Some require a deep integration with whatever mechanism is used for green processes/threads and growable stacks, others don't. Etc.
When looking at languages like Erlang, JavaScript, Python, or Go, the choices made at the language level are partly reflected in their garbage collectors.
That idea of a universal/generic VM supporting many languages has been tried many times, with limited success, for example with the JVM, CLR, or Parrot. What makes this different?
Garbage collectors are a leaky abstraction: Some support interior pointers, others don't. Some support parallel tasks sharing memory, others don't. Some require compaction, making C FFI more difficult, others don't. Some require a deep integration with whatever mechanism is used for green processes/threads and growable stacks, others don't. Etc.
When looking at languages like Erlang, JavaScript, Python, or Go, the choices made at the language level are partly reflected in their garbage collectors.
That idea of a universal/generic VM supporting many languages has been tried many times, with limited success, for example with the JVM, CLR, or Parrot. What makes this different?