alt Hacker NewsNot including GC would have been a mistake. Having to carry a complete garbage collector with every program, especially on platforms like browsers were excellent ones already exist, would have been a waste.
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ridiculous_fish • yesterday at 6:42 PM
Doesn't every WASM program have to carry its own malloc/free today?
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em-bee • yesterday at 6:45 PM
how is that different from compiling against a traditional CPU which also doesn't have a built in GC? i mean those programs that need a GC already have one. so what is the benefit of including one on the "CPU"?
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It's also important because sometimes you want a WebAssembly instance to hold a reference to a GC object from Javascript, such as a DOM object, or be able to return a similar GC object back to Javascript or to another separate WebAssembly instance. Doing the first part alone is easy to do with a little bit of JS code (make the JS code hold a reference to the GC object, give the Wasm an id that corresponds to it, and let the Wasm import some custom JS functions that can operate on that id), but it's not composable in a way that lets the rest of those tasks work in a general way.