WebAssembly / WebAssembly/custom-descriptors

How to specify function wrapper APIs?

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Dominant language
WebAssembly
Stars
12
Forks
3
Avg merge
3d 2h
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

As we've discussed at various points, we still need to spec two APIs for wrapping WebAssembly functions: one for allowing the functions to be called with new and another to pass the receiver as the first parameter. These functions should be similar to these wrappers you can write today:

function callableWithNew(f) {
  return function(...args) {
    return f(...args);
  )
)
function withReceiver(f) {
  return function(...args) {
    return f(this, ...args);
  )
)

However, we would prefer not to have to materialize these wrappers in stack traces or fake making their bodies available via toString(), etc., which suggests these should not be normal JS functions. But we also don't want them to be WebAssembly.Function instances with the associated Wasm types and linking semantics because that would inhibit the optimizations Binaryen can do to the types of functions that can be passed to configureAll.

How can these best be specified?

cc @rmahdav @jakobkummerow

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the wrapper examples and the existing discussion in this issue, including the concerns about stack traces, toString(), WebAssembly.Function types, and Binaryen optimizations. Done means reaching an agreed specification for both wrapper APIs and documenting their semantics and constraints; no files or tests are identified in the issue.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript, wasm
Domain
api, compilers
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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