[dathinab]

"designed for AOT" means it ships platform independent byte code, which is easy to turn into assembly/machine code before running it.

AOT is a counter part to JIT:

- AOT ahead of time (but still on the system, e.g. just before running)

- JIT just in time (while interpreting code you notice a hot section and turn it into native code)

So what most WASM runtime do is parse the WASM byte code, running certain checks for wellformedness and emit assembly (with necessary bounds checks, etc. to not escape the WASM sandbox).

This doesn't mean you can't interpret it, or interpret + JIT it, it's just that AOT seemed like a better choice then JIT or pure interpretation for WASM, as just interpreting it isn't fast enough compared to JavaScript JIT/or asm.js, to make it worth adding it to the web.