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by tlively
2140 days ago
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One of the precursors of WebAssembly was Portable Native Client (PNaCl)[1], which did use a frozen subset of LLVM IR as its program representation. But LLVM IR was designed to be a compiler IR, not a program binary format. WebAssembly was specifically designed for the Web use case, and unlike LLVM IR it supports streaming compilation and requires structured control flow, which makes it easier and less risky to implement in JS engines. Other commenters are correct that LLVM IR has more information in it than WebAssembly, but that is working as intended. The idea is that toolchains will do the heavy optimization work so that WebAssembly engines can be simpler and just do the final code generation. [1] https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/nacl-and-pnacl |
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