[xuejie]

Curious if we're gonna have a complete redesigned virtual machine without considering C-like conventions, how do you think we should do that?

I've heard about alternative CPU architectures in the Lisp machine days that never gone popular, and just wonder if there're such things in the modern era.

[repsilat]

Mostly I'm annoyed because I wanted to try out a bunch of x86 assembly tricks to implement coroutines, and I wanted to try making a language that would spit out and execute its own machine code to do C++ templates at runtime. Those sorts of things get harder when they don't fit the programming model of the people who designed the language/VM.

Of course, portability and safety are going to be problematic there, and those can't be compromised on for a project like WASM. And even if I can't get the power I want out of the base programming model, I can approximate it more slowly in other ways. Turing completeness and all that.

I'm not familiar enough with how CPUs are laid out to know whether a hypothetical instruction set or programming model is supportable in silicon and I haven't read or thought much about it either. In any case I think that would be pretty far outside the scope of what WASM is trying to do.