Events
WebAssembly Research Center
Wasm Research Day
Wasm Research Day brings together researchers from academia and industry, as well as participants in the CG standards body, to discuss research and long-term topics related to WebAssembly. Wasm Research Day provides a unique opportunity for participants to discuss both ongoing standardization work and strategic directions for WebAssembly.
WebAssembly Research Center Hosts 2024 Research Day
CMU hosted WebAssembly Research Day in June 2024, bringing together researchers from academia and industry and the W3C Community Group overseeing the standards governing the platform.
More than 60 people attended the event in person and at times up to 50 people joined the sessions virtually. It was the largest turnout for a WebAssembly Research Day in the event's three-year history and the first time the event was held at a university.
Read more in the full article.
Highlights From Wasm Research Day 2024
Engineering a Formal Language Spec
"... SpecTec, a DSL and toolchain that facilitates both the Wasm specification and the generation of artefacts necessary for standardisation." — Andreas Rossberg, independent
whamm! A WebAssembly Bytecode Instrumentation DSL
"... remedy these bytecode rewriting issues by interfacing with a runtime engine that directly supports instrumentation." — Elizabeth Gilbert, Carnegie Mellon University
Wasm-R3: Record-Reduce-Replay for Realistic and Standalone WebAssembly Benchmarks
"... Wasm-R3, the first record and replay technique for Wasm. Wasm-R3 transparently records execution traces from real-world web applications, optimizes the traces and produces standalone replay modules executable on any Wasm engine without a host environment." — Doehyun Baek, KAIST
Leveraging Wasm as a Debugging Platform for Resource-Constrained Systems
"... leveraging Wasm's platform-agnostic format can enable minimal overhead debugging on resource-constrained on-board devices by utilizing the power of high-performance, off-board devices." — Arjun Ramesh, Carnegie Mellon University
A Cross-Architecture View of Distributed Applications Using WebAssembly
"... preliminary results of running microservices as OCI-compliant Wasm modules and how it compares with the traditional native Docker container approach." — Mats Brorsson, University of Luxembourg
Niche Properties of Wasm Execution on the Internet Computer Blockchain
"... execution should satisfy a number of additional properties which are not commonly required in other contexts where WebAssembly is being used." — Adam Bratschi-Kaye, DFINITY Foundation
wevaling the wasms: AOT JS Compilation to WebAssembly
"... introduces weval, the Wasm partial evaluator, and its use to compile JavaScript ahead-of-time with the SpiderMonkey engine, showing good speedups." — Chris Fallin, Fastly
View recorded talks from Wasm Research Day 2023.
Highlights From Wasm Research Day 2023
Software Fault Isolation and WebAssembly: Tradeoffs and Synergies
"... new work in software fault isolation (SFI), the technique used by NaCl, for creating secure software sandboxes that have less than half the overhead of sandboxes produced by LLVM-based WebAssembly-to-native compilers, while still allowing tens of thousands of processes in a single address space." — Zachary Yedidia, Stanford University
Understanding Wasm Performance for Cloud Applications Across Architectures and Runtimes
"... investigate the performance and resource characteristics of WebAssembly programs using four different WebAssembly runtimes (WasmTime, WAMR, WasmEdge and Wasmer) and on three different architectures (x86_64, ARM64 and RISCV64)." — Mats Brorsson and Sangeeta Kakati, University of Luxembourg
Iso-Recursive Types for Wasm GC
"... a semantics for an extended form of iso-recursive subtyping, and which is the basis for the type system in Wasm." — Andreas Rossberg, independent
Generating Executable Specification From Formal Semantics of WebAssembly
"... an automated methodology for extracting a prose description from the definition of the Wasm semantics in a domain-specific language." — Sukyoung Ryu, KAIST
Language-Agnostic Resilience Engineering With WASM
"... explore different approaches to instrumenting applications, such as bytecode rewriting and direct instrumentation support provided by the Wizard research engine, and show how we approach this problem in the context of Dfinity's Internet Computer." — Elizabeth Gilbert, Carnegie Mellon University
Leveraging Wasm Instrumentation
"... how WebAssembly instrumentation can enable novel performance analysis and runtime debugging in a flexible manner which targets not just offline testing, but also minimally intrusive profiling in deployment." — Arjun Ramesh and Tianshu Huang, Carnegie Mellon University
Bringing Orchestration to the Edge With the WebAssembly Component Model
"... creating pluggable hardware abstraction layers using the WebAssembly Component Model." — Merlijn Sebrechts, Ghent University - imec
Owi: A Symbolic Interpreter for Wasm
"... Owi, an interpreter than can do concrete or symbolic execution of Wasm code." — Leo Andres and Pierre Chambart, OCamlPro, Universite Paris-Saclay
Supporting Stack Switching in Wasm
"... implemented the design in Wasmtime, a production-grade Wasm engine ... enables us [to] run programs that interface the system." — Daniel Hillerstroem, The University of Edinburgh
Optimizing SFI Performance, Scalability and Spectre Resistance on Modern CPUs
"... how a combination of Segue, ColorGuard and minor compiler modifications can harden WebAssembly against Spectre attacks at low costs." — Shravan Ravi Narayan, UT Austin
Highlights from Wasm Research Day 2022
Fixpoint: Computation-Centric Networking
" ... framework for computation-centric networking, Fixpoint, is based on a low-level lightweight language of computation on data, Fix. Fix represents computations with WebAssembly modules, and Fixpoint implements a toolchain that compiles Fix into raw machine codelets ..." — Yuhan Deng, Stanford University Ph.D. student
RichWasm: Bringing Type Safe Shared-Memory Interoperability to WebAssembly
" ... a higher-level version of WebAssembly with an enriched capability-based type system to support fine-grained type-safe shared-memory interoperability." — Amal Ahmed, Northeastern University
MSWasm: Soundly Enforcing Memory-Safe Execution of Unsafe Code
" ... develop a novel, language-independent memory-safety property based on colored memory locations and pointers. This property also lets us reason about the security guarantees of a formal C-to-MSWasm compiler and prove that it always produces memory-safe programs ..." — Marco Vassena, Utrecht University
Usefully Mechanising All of WebAssembly
" ... WasmCert-Isabelle, a mechanisation of the WebAssembly specification; and recent work on developing WasmRef-Isabelle, a practically-useful reference implementation of WebAssembly ..." — Conrad Watt, University of Cambridge
WasmFX: Structured Stack Switching via Effect Handlers in WebAssembly
" ... to introduce a unified structured mechanism based on Plotkin and Pretnar's effect handlers which is sufficiently general to cover present use-cases as well as being forwards compatible ..." — Daniel Hillerström, The University of Edinburgh
An End-to-End Toolchain for Evaluating WebAssembly Runtimes for CPS-IoT Use Cases
" ... an end-to-end toolchain for defining and executing various benchmark applications spanning over different runtimes with numerous configuration options as well as visualizing the end results." — Chris Woods and Ajay Chhokra, Siemens
A Safe Way of Replacing Dynamic Checks With Static Checks in WebAssembly
" ... Wasm-check, which introduces variations of existing WebAssembly instructions but without run-time safety checks." — Adam T. Geller, University of British Columbia Ph.D. student
Giving the Cloud an Edge With WASM
" ... orchestration platform where WASM provides key advantages in the automotive and industrial manufacturing domain." — Arjun Ramesh, Tianshu Huang and Anthony Rowe, Carnegie Mellon University
WebAssembly as the Basis for Layered Runtime Systems
" ... fast-forward to look at a whole new set of language runtime system designs that are made possible with some new features that can be added to Wasm." — Ben L. Titzer, Carnegie Mellon University