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Web Embedding

Unsurprisingly, one of WebAssembly's primary purposes is to run on the Web, for example embedded in Web browsers (though this is not its only purpose).

This means integrating with the Web ecosystem, leveraging Web APIs, supporting the Web's security model, preserving the Web's portability, and designing in room for evolutionary development. Many of these goals are clearly reflected in WebAssembly's high-level goals. In particular, WebAssembly MVP will be no looser from a security point of view than if the module was JavaScript.

More concretely, the following is a list of points of contact between WebAssembly and the rest of the Web platform that have been considered:

JavaScript API

A JavaScript API is provided which allows JavaScript to compile WebAssembly modules, perform limited reflection on compiled modules, store and retrieve compiled modules from offline storage, instantiate compiled modules with JavaScript imports, call the exported functions of instantiated modules, alias the exported memory of instantiated modules, etc.

Modules

WebAssembly's modules allow for natural integration with the ES6 module system.

Names

A WebAssembly module imports and exports functions. WebAssembly names functions using arbitrary-length byte sequences. Any 8-bit values are permitted in a WebAssembly name, including the null byte and byte sequences that don't correspond to any Unicode code point regardless of encoding. The most natural Web representation of a mapping of function names to functions is a JS object in which each function is a property. Property names in JS are UTF-16 encoded strings. A WebAssembly module may fail validation on the Web if it imports or exports functions whose names do not transcode cleanly to UTF-16 according to the following conversion algorithm, assuming that the WebAssembly name is in a Uint8Array called array:

function convertToJSString(array)
{
  var string = "";
  for (var i = 0; i < array.length; ++i)
    string += String.fromCharCode(array[i]);
  return decodeURIComponent(escape(string));
}

This performs the UTF8 decoding (decodeURIComponent(escape(string))) using a common JS idiom. Transcoding failure is detected by decodeURIComponent, which may throw URIError. If it does, the WebAssembly module will not validate. This validation rule is only mandatory for Web embedding.

Security

WebAssembly's security model should depend on the same-origin policy, with cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and subresource integrity to enable distribution through content distribution networks and to implement dynamic linking.

SIMD

Once SIMD is supported WebAssembly would:

  • Be statically typed analogous to SIMD.js-in-asm.js;
  • Reuse specification of operation semantics (with TC39);
  • Reuse backend implementation (same IR nodes).

GC

Once GC is supported, WebAssembly code would be able to reference and access JavaScript, DOM, and general WebIDL-defined objects.