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Is WebAssembly Memory64 worth using?
After many long years, the Memory64 proposal for WebAssembly has finally been released in both Firefox 134 and Chrome 133. In short, this proposal adds 64-bit pointers to WebAssembly.
The host (in this case, a browser) simply allocates memory for the WebAssembly module using a system call like mmap or VirtualAlloc. These are simply extra instructions inserted into the machine code on each memory access—the equivalent of writing if (address >= memory.length) { trap(); } before every single load. al. With the growing popularity of WebAssembly and other sandboxed VMs, this could be a very impactful change that improves performance while also eliminating the wasted address space from large reservations.
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