wasmi

Added

• Allows Wasmi CLI to be installed with locked dependencies. (#1096)
  • This can be done as follows: cargo install --locked wasmi_cli

Fixed

• Allow Wasm module instantiation in host functions called from Wasmi's executor. (#1116)

Changed

• Limit number of parameter and result types in FuncType to 1000, each. (#1116)

Dev. Note

• Significantly improved and Wasmi's CI and made it a lot faster.
  • Multi PR effort: #1098, #1100, #1104
• Refactored and cleaned-up call based and Rust sourced Wasmi benchmarks.
  • Call-based Benchmarks: #1102, #1113
  • Rust-sourced Benchmarks: #1107, #1108, #1109, #1111, #1115

Added

• Added Error trait impls for all Wasmi error types impleemnting Display. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1089)
  • Contributed by kajacx.

Fixed

• Fixed compilation for Rust versions <1.78. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1093)
• Fixed nightly clippy warning about map_err. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1094)

Added

• Added support for Wasm custom sections processing. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1085)
  • It is now possible to query name and data of Wasm custom sections of a Module.
  • Use the new Config::ignore_custom_sections flag to disable this functionality.
• Added Config::ignore_custom_sections flag to disable processing custom sections if this is unwanted. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1085)
• Add Memory::{data_ptr, data_size, size} methods. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1082)
• Added a Wasmi usage guide documentation. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1072)
  • Link: https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/blob/master/docs/usage.md

Changed

• Optimized the Wasmi executor in various ways.
  • In summary the Wasmi executor now more optimally caches the currently used Wasm instance and optimizes access to instance related data. In particular access to the default linear memory bytes as well as the value of the global variable at index 0 (often used as shadow stack pointer) are more efficient.
  • The following PRs are part of this effort:
    • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1059
    • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1062
    • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1068
    • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1069
    • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1065
    • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1075
    • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1076
• Changed Memory::grow signature to mirror Wasmtime's Memory::grow method. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1082)

Removed

• Removed Memory::current_pages method. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1082)
  • Users should use the new Memory::size method instead.

Fixed

• Fix overlapping reuse of local preservation slots. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1057)
  • Thanks again to kaiavintr for reporting the bug.

Fixed

• Refine and generalize the fix for v0.32.1. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1054)

Fixed

• Fixes a miscompilation when merging two copy instructions where the result of the first copy is also the input to the second copy and vice versa. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1052)
  • Thanks to kaiavintr for reporting the bug.

Note:

• This release is the culmination of months of research, development and QA with a new execution engine utilizing register-based IR at its core boosting both startup and execution performance to new levels for the Wasmi interpreter.
• This release is accompanied with an article that presents some of the highlights.

Added

• Added a new execution engine based on register-based bytecode. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/729)
  • The register-based Wasmi Engine executes roughly 80-100% faster and compiles roughly 30% slower according to benchmarks conducted so far.
• Added Module::new_unchecked API. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/829)
  • This allows to compile a Wasm module without Wasm validation which can be useful when users know that their inputs are valid Wasm binaries.
  • This improves Wasm compilation performance for faster startup times by roughly 10-20%.
• Added Wasm compilation modes. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/844)
  • When using Module::new Wasmi eagerly compiles Wasm bytecode into Wasmi bytecode which is optimized for efficient execution. However, this compilation can become very costly especially for large Wasm binaries.
  • The solution to this problem is to introduce new compilation modes, namely:
    • CompilationMode::Eager: Eager compilation, what Wasmi did so far. (default)
    • CompilationMode::LazyTranslation: Eager Wasm validation and lazy Wasm translation.
    • CompilationMode::Lazy: Lazy Wasm validation and translation.
  • Benchmarks concluded that
    • CompilationMode::LazyTanslation: Usually improves startup performance by a factor of 2 to 3.
    • CompilationMode::Lazy: Usually improves startup performance by a factor of up to 27.
  • Note that CompilationMode::Lazy can lead to partially validated Wasm modules which can introduce non-determinism when using different Wasm implementations. Therefore users should know what they are doing when using CompilationMode::Lazy if this is a concern.
  • Enable lazy Wasm compilation with:

    let mut config = wasmi::Config::default();
    config.compilation_mode(wasmi::CompilationMode::Lazy);
    

  • When CompilationMode::Lazy or CompilationMode::LazyTranslation and fuel metering is enabled the first function access that triggers compilation (and validation) will charge fuel respective to the number of bytes of the Wasm function body. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/876)
• Added non-streaming Wasm module compilation. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1035)
  • So far Wasmi only offered a streaming Wasm module compilation API, however most users probably never really needed that. So starting from this version both Module::new and Module::new_unchecked are now non-streaming with insane performance improvements of up to 80% in certain configurations.
  • For streaming Wasm module users we added Module::new_streaming and Module::new_streaming_unchecked APIs.
• Added Module::validate API. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/840)
  • This allows to quickly check if a Wasm binary is valid according to a Wasmi Engine config.
  • Note that this does not translate the Wasm and thus Module::new or Module::new_unchecked might still fail due to translation errors.
• CLI: Added --compilation-mode argument to enable lazy Wasm compilation. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/849)
• Added --verbose mode to Wasmi CLI by @tjpalmer. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/957)
  • By default Wasmi CLI no longer prints messages during execution.
• Added Memory::new_static constructor by @Ddystopia. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/939)
  • This allows to construct a Wasm Memory from a static byte array which is especially handy for certain embedded use cases.
• Added LinkerBuilder type. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/989)
  • Using LinkerBuilder to create new Linkers with the same set of host functions is a lot more efficient than creating those Linkers the original way. However, the initial LinkerBuilder construction will be as inefficient as building up a Linker previously.
• Added EnforcedLimits configuration option to Config. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/985)
  • Some users want to run Wasm binaries in a specially restricted or limited mode. For example this mode limits the amount of functions, globals, tables etc. can be defined in a single Wasm module. With this change they can enable this new strict mode using

    let mut config = wasmi::Config::default();
    config.enforced_limits(wasmi::EnforcedLimits::strict());
    

    In future updates we might relax this to make EnforcedLimits fully customizable.
• Added EngineWeak constructed via Engine::weak. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1003)
  • This properly mirrors the Wasmtime API and allows users to store weak references to the Engine.
• Added no-hash-maps crate feature to the wasmi crate. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1007)
  • This tells the wasmi crate to avoid using hash based data structures which can be beneficial for running Wasmi in some embedded environments such as wasm32-unknown-unknown that do not support random sources and thus are incapable to spawn hash maps that are resilient to malicious actors.
  • Note that Wasmi has always avoided using hash map based data structures prior to this change so not enabling this new crate feature kind of acts as an optimization.
• Added Default implementation for Store<T> where T: Default. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1031)
  • This mostly serves as a convenient way to create a minimal Wasmi setup.
• Added WasmTy implementations for f32 and f64 Rust primitives. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1031)
  • This is convenience for Linker::func_wrap calls that take those primitives as arguments. Before this change users had to use F32 and F64 instead which is a bit cumbersome.

Changed

• Minimum Rust version set to 1.77. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/961)
• CLI: Enabled Wasm tail-calls and extend-const proposals by default. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/849)
  • We expect those Wasm proposals to be stabilized very soon so we feel safe to enable them by default already.
• Improved Debug and Display impls for NaNs of Wasm f32 and f64 values.
  • They now show nan:0x{bytes} where {bytes} is their respective raw bytes.
• Implement Sync for ResumableInvocation and TypedResumableInvocation. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/870)
• Properly mirror Wasmtime's fuel API. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1002)
• Renamed some Wasmi items to improve its Wasmtime mirroring. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1011)
• Improved Wasmtime API mirror for Store fuel. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1002)
• Enabled Config::tail_call and Config::extended_const by default. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/1031)
  • Those Wasm proposals have been moved to phase 4 for many months now.

Removed

• Removed the stack-machine bytecode based Wasmi Engine backend. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/818)
  • The new register-based bytecode based Wasmi Engine is more promising and the Wasmi team does not want to maintain two different engine backends.
• Removed FuelConsumptionMode from Config. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/877)
  • FuelConsumptionMode was required to differentiate between lazy and eager fuel consumption. This was necessary due to how lazy fuel consumption was implemented in that it would pre-charge for instruction execution were the exact amount of required fuel was not possible to determine at compilation time. Examples are memory.grow and table.copy instructions. The linked PR improved lazy fuel consumption to no longer pre-charge and instead pre-check if the operation is going to succeed and only charge fuel in that case.

Dev. Note

• Added execution fuzzing and differential fuzzing.
  • PRs: https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/832, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/833
  • Both fuzzing strategies are applied on each commit in our CI pipeline.
• Updated CI jobs to use dtolnay/rust-toolchain instead of actions-rs because the latter was deprecated. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/842)

Added

• Added ResourceLimiter API known from Wasmtime. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/737)
  • This API allows to limit growable Wasm resources such as Wasm tables and linear memories.
  • Special thanks to Graydon Hoare for contributing this feature!

Fixes

• Fixed a bug were Module::len_globals internal API returned length of linear memories instead. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/741)

Changed

• Removed intx crate dependency. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/727)
  • The dependence on the intx crate was accidental and not really required at any time.
• Optimized f64.const instructions for f64 constant values that can losslessly be encoded as 32-bit f32 value. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/746)

Dev. Note

• We now publish and record graphs of benchmarks over time. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/740)
  • This allows Wasmi developers to better inspect performance changes over longer periods of time.
• Updated dev. dependencies:
  • criterion 0.4.0 -> 0.5.0
  • wast 0.52.0 -> 0.62.0

Changed

• Optimized Wasmi bytecode memory consumption. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/718)
  • This reduced the memory consumption of Wasmi bytecode by organizing the instructions into so-called instruction words, effectively reducing the amount of bytes required per Wasmi instruction 16 bytes to 8 bytes. There was an experiment with 4 bytes but experiments confirmed that 8 bytes per instruction word was the sweetspot for Wasmi execution and translation performance.
  • This did not affect execution performance too much but we saw performance improvements for translation from Wasm to Wasmi bytecode by roughly 15-20%.
• Optimized call and return_call for Wasm module internal calls. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/724)
  • Wasmi bytecode now differentiates between calls to Wasm module internal functions and imported functions which allows the Wasmi bytecode executor to perform the common internal calls more efficiently.
  • This led to an execution performance improvement across the board but especially for call intense workloads of up to 30% in some test cases.

Added

• Added support for extended-const Wasm proposal. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/707)
• Added fuel consumption modes. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/706)
  • This allows eager and lazy fuel consumption modes to be used which mainly affects bulk operations such as table.copy and memory.grow. Eager fuel consumption always consumes fuel before a bulk operation for the total amount independent of success or failure of the operation whereras lazy fuel consumption only consumes fuel for successful executions.

Changed

• Normalize fuel costs of all instructions. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/705)
  • With this change most instructions cost roughly 1 fuel upon execution. This is more similar to how Wasmtime deals with fuel metered instruction costs. Before this change Wasmi tried to have fuel costs that more closely mirror the computation intensity of the respective instruction according to benchmarks.

Added

• Added support for the tail-call Wasm proposal. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/683)
• Added support for Linker defined host functions. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/692)
  • Apparently this PR introduced some performance wins for the Wasm target according to our tests. This information shall be taken with a grain of salt since we are not sure why those performance improvement occured since the PR's functionality is orthogonal to Wasm engine performance.
  • Required precursor refactoring PR: https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/681

Changed

• The wasmi_wasi crate now more closely mirrors the wasmtime_wasi crate API. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/700)

Internal

• Refactor the Wasmi Wasm engine to handle Wasm calls and returns in its core. (#694)
  • This improved performance of Wasm function calls significantly at the cost of host function call performance.
  • Also this seemed to have impacts Wasm target performance quite positively, too.
• The Store now handles Wasm functions and host functions separately. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/686)
  • This allows to store Wasm functions into the StoreInner type which was an important step towards the major refactoring in (#694)
  • It was expected that host function call performance would degrade by this PR but our tests actually showed that the opposite was true and Wasm target performance was improved overall.
• Introduce ValueStackPtr abstraction for the Wasmi engine core. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/688)
  • This change significantly improved performance especially on the Wasm target according to our tests.
• Optimize memory.{load,store} when reading or writing single bytes. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/689)
  • The performance wins were more modest than we hoped but still measurable.
• Use StoreContextMut<T> instead of impl AsContextMut in the Wasmi engine core. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/685)
  • This is a simple refactoring with the goal to make the Rust compiler have a simpler job at optimizing certain functions in the engine's inner workings since StoreContextMut provides more information to the compiler.

Added

• Added support for fuel metering in the Wasmi CLI. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/679)
  • Users can now specify an amount of fuel via --fuel N to commit for the execution. Upon success the Wasmi CLI will display the total amount of consumed and remaining fuel.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug that Wasmi CLI did not preserve the WASI exit status. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/677)
  • Thanks to YAMAMOTO Takashi @yamt for reporting the issue.
• The Wasmi CLI now properly displays exported functions if --invoke x was provided and x was not found. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/678)
• Applied minor fixes to Config docs. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/673)

Changed

• Defer charging fuel for costly bulk memory and bulk table operations. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/676)
  • Note that the check to assert that enough fuel is provided for these costly operation is still happening before the actual computation and only the charging is deferred to after a successful run. The reason behind this is that all the affected operations fail fast and therefore should not cost lots of fuel in case of failure.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug where resuming a resumable function from a host function with more outputs than inputs could lead to incorrect behavior or runtime panics. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/671)
  • Thanks to Pierre Krieger (tomaka) for reporting and crafting an initial minimal test case.

Added

• Wasmi CLI: Add WASI support. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/597)
  • Big shoutout to Onigbinde Oluwamuyiwa Elijah for contributing this to Wasmi!
• Add built-in support for fuel metering. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/653)
  • This allows to control the runtime of Wasm executions in a deterministic fasion effectively avoiding the halting problem by charging for executed instructions. Not using the feature will not affect the execution efficiency of Wasmi for users.
• Add Pages::checked_sub method. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/660)
• Add Func::new constructor. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/662)
  • This allows to create Func instances from closures without statically known types.

Changed

• Update to wasmparser-nostd version 0.100.1. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/666)

Internal

• Clean up and reorganization of the wasmi_cli crate. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/655)
• Refactoring of internal host call API. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/664)

Added

• Added Config::floats option to enable or disable Wasm float operators during Wasm validation.
• Trap::downcast_mut and Trap::downcast methods. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/650)
  • This helps users to downcast into T: HostError.
• Added WasmType impls for FuncRef and ExternRef types. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/642)
  • This allows FuncRef and ExternRef instances to be used in TypedFunc parameters and results.

Removed

• Removed from From impls from wasmparser-nostd types to Wasmi types.
  • For example From<wasmparser::FuncType> for wasmi::FuncType got removed.

Changed

• Update the wasmparser-nostd dependency from version 0.91.0 to 0.99.0. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/640)
• The Trap type is no longer Clone. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/650)

Internal

• Resolved plenty of technical debt and improved structure of the Wasmi crate.
  • PRs: https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/648, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/647, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/646, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/645, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/644, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/641

Added

• Added support for the bulk-memory Wasm proposal. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/628)
• Added support for the reference-types Wasm proposal. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/635)
• Added ValueType::{is_ref, is_num} methods. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/635)
• Added Value::{i32, i64, f32, f64, externref, funcref} accessor methods to Value.

Fixed

• Fix a bug with Table and Memory imports not respecting the current size. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/635)
  • This sometimes led to the problem that valid Table and Memory imports could incorrectly be rejected for having an invalid size for the subtype check.
  • This has been fixed as part of the reference-types Wasm proposal implementation.

Changed

• Use more references in places to provide the compiler with more optimization opportunities. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/634)
  • This led to a speed-up across the board for Wasm targets of about 15-20%.
• Move the Value type from wasmi_core to Wasmi. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/636)
  • This change was necessary in order to support the reference-types Wasm proposal.
• There has been some consequences from implementing the reference-types Wasm proposal which are listed below:
  • The Value type no longer implements Copy and PartialEq.
  • The From<&Value> for UntypedValue impl has been removed.
  • Remove some From impls for Value.
  • Moved some Display impls for types like FuncType and Value to the wasmi_cli crate.
  • Remove the try_into API from the Value type.
    • Users should use the new accessor methods as in the Wasmtime API.

Internal

• Update wast dependency from version 0.44 to 0.52. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/632)
• Update the Wasm spec testsuite to the most recent commit: 3a04b2cf9
• Improve error reporting for the internal Wasm spec testsuite runner.
  • It will now show proper span information in many more cases.

Note: This is the Wasmtime API Compatibility update.

Added

• Add Module::get_export method. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/617)

Changed

• Removed ModuleError export from crate root. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/618)
  • Now ModuleError is exported from crate::errors just like all the other error types.
• Refactor and cleanup traits underlying to IntoFunc. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/620)
  • This is only the first step in moving closer to the Wasmtime API traits.
• Mirror Wasmtime API more closely. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/615, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/616)
  • Renamed Caller::host_data method to Caller::data.
  • Renamed Caller::host_data_mut method to Caller::data_mut.
  • Add Extern::ty method and the ExternType type.
  • Rename ExportItem to ExportType:
    • Rename the ExportItem::kind method to ty and return ExternType instead of ExportItemKind.
    • Remove the no longer used ExportItemKind entirely.
  • The ExportsIter now yields items of the new type Export instead of pairs of (&str, Extern).
  • Rename ModuleImport to ImportType.
    • Rename ImportType::item_type to ty.
    • Rename ImportType::field to name.
    • Properly forward &str lifetimes in ImportType::{module, name}.
    • Replace ModuleImportType by ExternType.
  • Add new convenience methods to Instance:
    • Instance::get_func
    • Instance::get_typed_func
    • Instance::get_global
    • Instance::get_table
    • Instance::get_memory
  • Rename getters for querying types of runtime objects:
    • Func::func_type => Func::ty
    • Global::global_type => Global::ty
    • Table::table_type => Table::ty
    • Memory::memory_type => Memory::ty
    • Value::value_type => Value::ty
  • Remove Global::value_type getter.
    • Use global.ty().content() instead.
  • Remove Global::is_mutable getter.
    • Use global.ty().mutability().is_mut() instead.
  • Rename Mutability::Mutable to Var.
  • Add Mutability::is_mut getter.
    • While this API is not included in Wasmtime it is a useful convenience method.
  • Rename TableType::initial method to minimum.
  • Rename Table::len method to size.
  • Table and TableType now operate on u32 instead of usize just like in Wasmtime.
    • This affects Table::{new, size, set, get, grow} methods and TableType::{new, minimum, maximum} methods and their users.

Added

• Add missing TypedFunc::call_resumable API. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/605)
  • So far resumable calls were only available for the Func type. However, there was no technical reason why it was not implemented for TypedFunc so this mirrored API now exists.
  • This also cleans up rough edges with the Func::call_resumable API.

Changed

• Clean up the wasmi_core crate API. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/607, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/608, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/609)
  • This removes plenty of traits from the public interface of the crate which greatly simplifies the API surface for users.
  • The UntypedValue type gained some new methods to replace functionality that was provided in parts by the removed traits.
• The Wasmi crate now follows the Wasmtime API a bit more closely. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/613)
  • StoreContext new methods:
    • fn engine(&self) -> &Engine
    • fn data(&self) -> &T
  • StoreContextMut new methods:
    • fn engine(&self) -> &Engine
    • fn data(&self) -> &T
    • fn data_mut(&mut self) -> &mut T
  • Renamed Store::state method to Store::data.
  • Renamed Store::state_mut method to Store::data_mut.
  • Renamed Store::into_state method to Store::into_data.

Internal

• The Store and Engine types are better decoupled from their generic parts. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/610, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/611)
  • This might reduce binary bloat and may have positive effects on the performance. In fact we measured significant performance improvements on the Wasm target.

Added

• Add support for resumable function calls. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/598)
  • This feature allows to resume a function call upon encountering a host trap.
• Add support for concurrently running function executions using a single Wasmi engine.
  • This feature also allows to call Wasm functions from host functions. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/590)
• Add initial naive WASI support for Wasmi using the new wasmi_wasi crate. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/557)
  • Special thanks to Onigbinde Oluwamuyiwa Elijah for carrying the WASI support efforts!
  • Also thanks to Yuyi Wang for testing and improving initial WASI support. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/592, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/571, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/568)
  • Note: There is ongoing work to integrate WASI support in wasmi_cli so that the Wasmi CLI will then be able to execute arbitrary wasm-wasi files out of the box in the future.
• Add Module::imports that allows to query Wasm module imports. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/573, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/583)

Fixed

• Fix a bug that imported linear memories and tables were initialized twice upon instantiation. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/593)
• The Wasmi CLI now properly hints for file path arguments. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/596)

Changed

• The wasmi::Trap type is now more similar to Wasmtime's Trap type. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/559)
• The wasmi::Store type is now Send and Sync as intended. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/566)
• The Wasmi CLI now prints exported functions names if the function name CLI argument is missing. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/579)
• Improve feedback when running a Wasm module without exported function using Wasmi CLI. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/584)

Added

• Contribution documentation about fuzz testing. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/529)

Removed

• Removed some deprecated functions in the wasmi_core crate. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/545)

Fixed

• Fixed a critical performance regression introduced in Rust 1.65. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/518)
  • While the PR's main job was to clean up some code it was found out that it also fixes a critical performance regression introduced in Rust 1.65.
  • You can read more about this performance regression in this thread.

Changed

• Fixed handling of edge cases with respect to Wasm linear memory. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/449)
  • This allows for Wasmi to properly setup and use linear memory instances of up to 4GB.
• Optimize and improve Wasm instantiation. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/531)
• Optimize global.get of immutable non-imported globals. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/533)
  • Also added a benchmark test for this. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/532)

Internal

• Implemented miscellaneous improvements to our CI system.
  • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/539 (and more)
• Miscellaneous clean ups in wasmi_core and Wasmi's executor.
  • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/542 https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/541 https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/508 https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/543

Fixed

• Fixed a potential undefined behavior as reported by the miri tool with respect to its experimental stacked borrows. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/524)

Changed

• Optimized Wasm to Wasmi translation phase by removing unnecessary Wasm validation type checks. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/527)
  • Speedups were in the range of 15%.
• Linker::instantiate now takes &self instead of &mut self. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/512)
  • This allows users to easily predefine a linker and reused its definitions as shared resource.
• Fixed a bug were Caller::new was public. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/514)
  • It is now a private method as it was meant to be.
• Optimized TypedFunc::call at slight cost of Func::call. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/522)
  • For many parameters and return values the measured improvements are in the range of 25%. Note that this is only significant for a large amount of host to Wasm calls of small functions.

Internal

• Added new benchmarks and cleaned up benchmarking code in general.
  • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/525 https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/526 https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/521
• Add miri testing to Wasmi CI (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/523)

Changed

• Optimize for common cases for branch and return instructions. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/493)
  • This led to up to 10% performance improvement according to our benchmarks in some cases.
• Removed extraneous S: impl AsContext generic parameter from Func::typed method.
• Make IntoFunc, WasmType and WasmRet traits publicly available.
• Add missing impl for WasmRet for Result<T, Trap> where T: WasmType.
  • Without this impl it was impossible to provide closures to Func::wrap that returned Result<T, Trap> where T: WasmType, only Result<(), Trap> or Result<(T,), Trap> was possible before.

Internal

• Added wasmi_arena crate which defines all internally used arena data structures. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/502)
• Update to clap 4.0 in wasmi_cli. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/498)
• Many more improvements to our internal benchmarking CI. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/494, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/501, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/506, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/509)

Added

• Added Contibution Guidelines and Code of Conduct to the repository. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/485)

Changed

• Optimized instruction dispatch in the Wasmi interpreter. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/478, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/482)
  • This yielded combined speed-ups of ~20% across the board.
  • As a side effect we also refactored the way we compute branching offsets at Wasm module compilation time which improved performance of Wasm module compilation by roughly 5%.

Internal

• Our CI now also benchmarks Wasmi when ran inside Wasmtime as Wasm. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/483, https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/487)
  • This allows us to optimize Wasmi towards Wasm performance more easily in the future.

Added

• Added Memory::data_and_store_mut API inspired by Wasmtime's API. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/448)

Changed

• Updated wasmparser-nostd dependency from 0.90.0 to 0.91.0.
  • This improved performance of Wasm module compilation by ~10%.
• Updated wasmi_core from 0.3.0 to 0.4.0.
• Optimized execution of several Wasm float to int conversion instructions. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/439)
  • We measured a performance improvement of 6000% or in other words those instructions are now 60 times faster than before.
  • This allowed us to remove the big num-rational dependency from wasmi_core for some nice speed-ups in compilation time of Wasmi itself.
• Optimized global.get and global.set Wasm instruction execution. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/427)
  • This improved performance of those instructions by up to 17%.
• Optimized Wasm value stack emulation. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/459)
  • This improved performance of compute intense workloads by up to 23%.

Internal

• Added automated continuous benchmarking to Wasmi. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/422)
  • This allows us to have a more consistent overview over the performance of Wasmi.
• Updated criterion benchmarking framework to version 0.4.0.
• Reuse allocations during Wasm validation and translation:
  • Wasm validation and translation combined. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/462)
  • Wasm br_table translations. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/440)
• Enabled more useful clippy lints for Wasmi and wasmi_core. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/438)
• Reorganized the Wasmi workspace. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/466)

Changed

• Update wasmparser-nostd dependency from version 0.83.0 -> 0.90.0. Link:
  • This significantly improved Wasmi's Wasm parsing, validation and Wasm to Wasmi bytecode translation performance.

Internal

• Transition to the new wasmparser::VisitOperator API. Link
  • This again significantly improved Wasmi's Wasm parsing, validation and Wasm to Wasmi bytecode translation performance by avoiding many unnecessary unpredictable branches in the process.

Fixed

• Fixed bugs found during fuzzing the translation phase of Wasmi. Link
• Fix Read trait implementation for no_std compilations. Link

Changed

• Update to wasmi_core version 0.3.0.
• Changed API of wasmi::Config in order to better reflect the API of wasmtime::Config.
• Refactor Trap type to be of pointer size which resulted in significant performance wins across the board especially for call intense work loads. Link

Removed

• Removed support for virtual memory based Wasm linear memory. We decided to remove support since benchmarks showed that our current implementation actually regresses performance compared to our naive Vec based implementation. Link

Internal

• The wasmi::Engine now caches the bytes of the default linear memory for performance wins in memory.store and memory.load intense work loads. Link
• The Wasmi engine internals have been reorganized and modernised to improve performance on function call intense work loads. This resulted in performance improvements across the board. Link
• The Wasm to Wasmi bytecode translation now properly reuses heap allocations across function translation units which improved translation performance by roughly 10%. Link
• Optimized the Wasmi engine Wasm value stack implementation for significant performance wins across the board. Link
• Shrunk size of some internal identifier types for minor performance wins. Link
• Added initial naive fuzz testing for Wasm parsing, validation and Wasm to Wasmi bytecode translation. Link

Added

• Added support for the following Wasm proposals:

  • Import and export of mutable globals
  • Non-trapping float-to-int conversions
  • Sign-extension operators
  • Multi-value

  We plan to support more Wasm proposals in the future.

Changed

• Wasmi has been entirely redesigned and reimplemented. This work resulted in an entirely new API that is heavily inspired by the Wasmtime API, a brand new Wasm execution engine that performs roughly 30-40% better than the previous engine according to our benchmarks, the support of many Wasm proposals and Wasm parsing and validation using the battle tested wasmparser crate by the BytecodeAlliance.

  The new Wasmi design allows to reuse the Wasm execution engine resources instead of spinning up a new Wasm execution engine for every function call.

  Note: If you plan to use Wasmi it is of critical importance to compile Wasmi using the following Cargo profile settings:

  [profile.release]
  lto = "fat"
  codegen-units = 1
  

  If you do not use these profile settings you might risk regressing performance of Wasmi by up to 400%. You can read more about this issue here.

Removed

• Removed support for resuming function execution. We may consider to add this feature back into the new engine. If you are a user of Wasmi and want this feature please feel free to open an issue and provide us with your use case.

Fixed

• Support allocating 4GB of memory (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/452)

Note: Yanked because of missing wasmi_core bump.

Note: This is the last major release of the legacy Wasmi engine. Future releases are using the new Wasm execution engines that are currently in development. We may consider to publish new major versions of this Wasm engine as wasmi-legacy crate.

Changed

• Update dependency: wasmi-validation v0.4.2 -> v0.5.0

Changed

• Wasmi now depends on the wasmi_core crate.
• Deprecated RuntimeValue::decode_{f32,f64} methods.
  • Reason: These methods expose details about the F32 and F64 types. The RuntimeValue type provides from_bits methods for similar purposes.
  • Replacement: Replace those deprecated methods with F{32,64}::from_bits().into() respectively.
• Refactor traps in Wasmi: PR
  • This change also renames TrapKind to TrapCode.
  • The Wasmi crate now properly reuses the TrapCode definitions from the wasmi_core crate.
• Updated dependency:
  • parity-wasm v0.42 -> v0.45
  • memory_units v0.3.0 -> v0.4.0

Internal

• Rename RuntimeValue to Value internally.
• Now uses wat crate dependency instead of wabt for reading .wat files in tests.
• Updated dev-dependencies:
  • assert_matches: v1.1 -> v1.5
  • rand 0.4.2 -> 0.8.2
• Fix some clippy warnings.

Fixed

• Make Wasmi traps more conformant with the Wasm specification. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/300)
• Fixed a bug in {f32, f64}_copysign implementations. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/293)
• Fixed a bug in {f32, f64}_{min, max} implementations. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/295)

Changed

• Optimized Wasm to host calls. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/291)
  • In some artificial benchmarks we saw improvements of up to 42%!
• Introduce a more efficient LittleEndianConvert trait. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/290)

Internal

• Refactor and clean up benchmarking code and added more benchmarks.
  • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/299
  • https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/298
• Apply some clippy suggestions with respect ot #[must_use]. (https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/pull/288)
• Improve Rust code formatting of imports.
• Improve debug impl of ValueStack so that only the live parts are printed.

Added

• Support for virtual memory usage on Windows 64-bit platforms.
  • Technically we now support the same set of platforms as the region crate does: https://github.com/darfink/region-rs#platforms

Changed

• The Wasmi and wasmi-validation crates now both use Rust edition 2021.
• The README now better teaches how to test and benchmark the crate.
• Updated num-rational from version 0.2.2 -> 0.4.0.

Deprecated

• Deprecated MemoryInstance::get method.
  • Users are recommended to use MemoryInstance::get_value or MemoryInstance::get_into methods instead.

Removed

• Removed support for virtual memory on 32-bit platforms.
  • Note that the existing support was supposedly not more efficient than the Vec based fallback implementation anyways due to technical design.
• Removed the core crate feature that previously has been required for no_std builds.
  • Now users only have to specify --no-default-features for a no_std build.

Internal

• Fully deploy GitHub Actions CI and remove deprecated Travis based CI. Added CI jobs for:
  • Testing on Linux, MacOS and Windows
  • Checking docs and dead links in docs.
  • Audit crate dependencies for vulnerabilities.
  • Check Wasm builds.
  • File test coverage reports to codecov.io.

Changed

• Added possibility to forward reduced_stack_buffers crate feature to parity-wasm crate.

Internal

• Added a default rustfmt.toml configuration file.
• Fixed some warnings associated to Rust edition 2021.
  • Note: The crate itself remains in Rust edition 2018.

Changed

• Updated parity-wasm from verion 0.41 to 0.42.
• Bumped wasmi-validation from version 0.3.1 to 0.4.0.