Design

This repository contains documents describing the design and high-level overview of ewasm. Expect the contents of this repository to be in flux: everything is still under discussion.

What is WebAssembly?

WebAssembly (or Wasm as a contraction) is a new, portable, size- and load-time-efficient format. WebAssembly aims to execute at native speed by taking advantage of common hardware capabilities available on a wide range of platforms. WebAssembly is currently being designed as an open standard by a W3C Community Group.

Please review the WebAssembly design and instruction set first. (You can also make a pull request or raise an issue at the Wasm Github repo.)

A few key points: WebAssembly defines an instruction set, intermediate source format (WAST) and a binary encoded format (WASM). WebAssembly has a few higher level features, such as the ability to import and execute outside methods defined via an interface. LLVM includes a WebAssembly backend to generate WASM output. Major browser JavaScript engines will notably have native support for WebAssembly, including but not limited to: Google's V8 engine (Node.js and Chromium-based browsers), Microsoft's Chakra engine (Microsoft Edge), Mozilla's Spidermonkey engine (Firefox and Thunderbird). * Other non-browser implementations exist too: wasm-jit-prototype (a standalone VM using an LLVM backend), wabt (a stack-based interpreter), ml-proto (the OCaml reference interpreter), etc.

What is Ethereum flavored WebAssembly (ewasm)?

ewasm is a restricted subset of WASM to be used for contracts in Ethereum.

ewasm: specifies the VM semantics specifies the semantics for an ewasm contract specifies an Ethereum environment interface to facilitate interaction with the Ethereum environment from an ewasm contract specifies system contracts specifies metering for instructions and aims to restrict non-deterministic behavior * specifies a backwards compatible upgrade path to EVM1

Goals of the ewasm project

  • To provide a specification of ewasm contract semantics and the Ethereum interface
  • To provide an EVM transcompiler, preferably as an ewasm contract
  • To provide a metering injector, preferably as an ewasm contract
  • To provide a VM implementation for executing ewasm contracts
  • To implement an ewasm backend in the Solidity compiler
  • To provide a library and instructions for writing contracts in Rust
  • To provide a library and instructions for writing contracts in C

Glossary

  • Ewasm contract: a contract adhering to the ewasm specification
  • Ethereum environment interface (EEI): a set of methods available to ewasm contracts
  • metering: the act of measuring execution cost in a deterministic way
  • metering injector: a transformation tool inserting metering code to an ewasm contract
  • EVM transcompiler: an EVM bytecode (the current Ethereum VM) to ewasm transcompiler. See this chapter.

Resources

Projects

Design Process & Contributing

For now, high-level design discussions should continue to be held in the design repository, via issues and pull requests. Feel free to file issues.

Chat

Matrix
IRC freenode@ewasm
Gitter