Is Wasm Becoming Garbage? (Keynote)

WebAssembly (a.k.a. Wasm) is a low-level virtual machine that is designed to be lightweight, close to the metal and agnostic to any source languages' opinions about how to construct programs. This is the defining characteristic of Wasm that distinguishes it from other popular virtual machines. Yet we recently finalised a new feature addition bringing direct support for garbage collection to Wasm. In this talk, I explain why we did that and how the GC extension is designed to preserve the low-level spirit of Wasm to the extent possible. I will show how it can be targeted by compilers for typical object-oriented and functional languages and where we left room for future improvements.