GC / DOM / Web API Integration

NOTE: This is a future feature!

After the MVP, to realize the high-level goals of (1) integrating well with the existing Web platform and (2) supporting languages other than C++, WebAssembly needs to be able to:

• reference DOM and other Web API objects directly from WebAssembly code;
• call Web APIs (passing primitives or DOM/GC/Web API objects) directly from WebAssembly without calling through JavaScript; and
• efficiently allocate and manipulate GC objects directly from WebAssembly code.

The following document is a high-level sketch of one approach for implementing the above goals. Consider the contents incomplete and expect change over time.

An important constraint is that, while WebAssembly should allow tight integration with the Web, it should not bake in details or Web standards dependencies that prevent execution in a non-Web embedding. This suggests a design (called opaque reference types below) that hides the details of JavaScript and WebIDL behind Web-embedding-specific builtin modules. On the other hand, WebAssembly can define a set of native GC primitives that allowed portable GC code to be written regardless of the host environment.

Opaque reference types

The first feature is to extend module imports to allow modules to import opaque reference types. “Opaque” means that the reference type itself has no structural content and does not, e.g., define any methods or fields. Once imported, an opaque reference type can be used in the signature of other imported functions. Thus, the point of an opaque reference type is to be passed to and returned from exported functions.

Reference types are allowed to be used as the types of locals, parameters and return types. Additionally, references would be allowed as operands to operators that treat their values as black boxes (br, block, etc.). A new dynamic_cast operator would be added to allow checked casting from any opaque reference type to any other opaque reference type. Whether the cast succeeds is up to the host environment; WebAssembly itself will define no a priori subtyping relationship.

For reasons of safety and limiting nondeterminism, imported opaque reference types would not be able to be loaded from or stored to linear memory where they could otherwise be arbitrarily aliased as integers. Instead, a new set of operators would be added for allocating, deallocating, loading and storing from integer-indexed cells that could hold references and were not aliasable by linear memory.

With opaque reference types expressed as imports, host environments can provide access to various kinds of reference-counted or garbage-collected host-defined objects via builtin modules. While this design does not mandate a JavaScript VM or browser, it does allow natural integration with both JavaScript and WebIDL in a Web environment.

JavaScript integration

Using opaque reference types, JavaScript values could be made accessible to WebAssembly code through a builtin js module providing:

• an exported string opaque reference type and exported functions to allocate, query length, and index string values;
• an exported object opaque reference type and exported functions that correspond with the ES5 meta-object protocol including the ability to [[Call]] function objects;
• further exported opaque reference types for symbols and value types (including SIMD);
• an exported value opaque reference type with exported functions for constructing values from integers, floats, objects, strings, etc and with exported functions for querying the type of a value and extracting the abovementioned payload types.

Since a browser’s WebAssembly engine would have full knowledge of the js builtin module, it should be able to optimize string/object accesses as well as a normal JavaScript JIT compiler (perhaps even using the same JIT compiler).

WebIDL integration

Using opaque reference types, it would be possible to allow direct access to DOM and Web APIs by mapping their WebIDL interfaces to WebAssembly builtin module signatures. In particular:

• WebIDL interfaces (like WebGLRenderingContextBase or WebGLTexture) would map to exported opaque reference types;
• methods of WebIDL interfaces would map to exported functions where the receiver was translated into an explicit argument and WebIDL value types were mapped to appropriate value types (e.g., bindTexture would translate to void (WebGLRenderingContextBase, int32, WebGLTexture?)).

This high-level description glosses over many important details about WebIDL:

First, the WebIDL spec contains many JavaScript-specific details that are unnecessary in a WebAssembly context. In particular, there are basically three components specified by a WebIDL interface:

1. a signature declaration composed of language-independent data types (like IEEE754 doubles and floats);
2. a set of basic wellformedness checks that are executed on the arguments of the signature declared in (1); and
3. a JavaScript-specific algorithm that maps the arbitrary set of JavaScript values passed to a WebIDL invocation to the signature declared by (1) and checked by (2).

(1) and (2) of the WebIDL spec are meaningful to WebAssembly, but (3) would effectively be skipped.

Another important issue is mapping WebIDL values types that aren’t simple primitive types:

• Dictionary types would appear to require JavaScript objects but are actually defined as values such that they can be (and are, in various browser implementations) flattened to C structs. Thus, a natural WebAssembly binding would be to map dictionaries to structs in linear memory passed by reference (integer offset).
• The same goes for sequence types.
• Enumeration types could be mapped to canonical integers.
• Union types could be handled in multiple ways. One option is to treat the union type itself as an importable opaque reference type (when all the elements are themselves reference types). Another option is to introduce an overload of each signature for each element of the union type such that all calls passed a single element type and the full Union Type was never explicitly represented in WebAssembly.
• Callback function types could map to a (function pointer, environment pointer) closure pair.

Overall, the goal of mapping WebIDL to WebAssembly builtin modules is to avoid the need to define a duplicate WebAssembly interface for all Web APIs. In practice, some WebIDL patterns may have an unnatural or inefficient mapping into WebAssembly such that new overloads and best practices would need to be adopted. Over time, though, these rough edges would be ironed out leaving the long term benefit of defining Web APIs with a single interface and ensuring that JavaScript and WebAssembly always had access to the same raw functionality.

Native GC

In contrast to opaque reference types, a second feature would be to allow direct GC allocation and field access from WebAssembly code through non-opaque reference types.

There is a lot of the design left to consider for this feature, but a few points of tentative agreement are:

• To avoid baking in a single language’s object model, define low-level GC primitives (viz., structs and arrays) and allow the source language compiler to build up features like virtual dispatch and access control.
• GC struct and array types would have associated struct/array reference types that were similar to and symmetric with opaque reference types (just not opaque).
• The GC heap would be semantically distinct from linear memory and thus the fields of GC objects could safely hold reference types (unlike linear memory).
• The GC struct and array types could be passed to and from JavaScript by reflecting the WebAssembly GC objects in JavaScript using the Typed Objects proposal.