Show HN: TinyWasm - A tiny WebAssembly Runtime written in Rust<p>Hi HN! I'm excited to share TinyWasm (<a href="https://github.com/explodingcamera/tinywasm">https://github.com/explodingcamera/tinywasm</a>), a WebAssembly Interpreter I developed for my final university project.<p>The main goal of this project was to deepen my understanding of WebAssembly and interpreter design. TinyWasm successfully passes all the official WebAssembly 1.0 tests and also includes features from future proposals such as like bulk memory operations.<p>Initially more of a research project, TinyWasm focuses on simplicity and portability. It has minimal third-party dependencies, a small codebase, and is compatible with no_std environments. It's now available as a standalone library (<a href="https://crates.io/crates/tinywasm" rel="nofollow">https://crates.io/crates/tinywasm</a>), and I hope it can be useful for embedding into other projects and hacking on, especially because it's designed to be easy to understand and modify, while still being decently performant.<p>I'm looking forward to feedback, hope you find it useful!
Super nice project! I also spent the last month writing a WASM interpreter ( <a href="https://github.com/rrampage/wart">https://github.com/rrampage/wart</a> ) using Java 21. I started it as an excuse to try out the pattern matching in switch / sealed classes in Java. It kind of snowballed in scope and can now run Doom and Waforth ( <a href="https://github.com/remko/waforth">https://github.com/remko/waforth</a> )! Have not yet tried compiling it to WASM and running it as a meta-circular interpreter.
I’ve been working through the WebAssembly spec recently and it’s pretty interesting, there are many design aspects I wouldn’t have chosen.<p>Was there anything about the spec that was surprising or frustrating to you?
It would be interesting to have benchmarks in memory usage et performance versus the big projects like wasmtime and wasmer. There are quite a few interpreters in rust these days!<p>Did you plan for possible spec extension like WASI?
Thanks for sharing your project! How does performance change when the `unsafe` feature is disabled?<p>It looks like there is only one usage of `unsafe` outside of the no_std build: <a href="https://github.com/explodingcamera/tinywasm/blob/c50bae752f3e788faf66b376d065374cc4085931/crates/tinywasm/src/store/memory.rs#L192">https://github.com/explodingcamera/tinywasm/blob/c50bae752f3...</a>
Looks quite interesting ! Since this was done as a university project, did you have to write a report ? If you did and that it can be shared, I would love to go through it