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Dynamic translation of Smalltalk to WebAssembly


continuing with the DNA theme… In Catalyst, a WebAssembly implementation of the OpenSmalltalk virtual machine, there are three linguistic levels in play: Smalltalk, JavaScript (JS), and WebAs…

The array and struct instructions are part of the WASM garbage collection extension, which introduces types. As is typical with assembly-level code, there’s a lot of setup involved which seems quite verbose, but it enables fast paths for the execution machinery. In a future article, I’ll discuss the mechanisms by which we actually run the WASM code for a Smalltalk method.

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