Wasm 3 brings 64-bit address space and garbage collection

The Wasm W3C Community Group and the Wasm Working Group have announced the completion of WebAssembly (Wasm) 3 as the new live standard. The developers categorize version 3 as a major update in terms of both scope and time. They have been working on the new functions for up to eight years in some cases.

The biggest innovations in WebAssembly 3 include a 64-bit address space for memory and tables (for applications up to 16 exabytes), the declaration of multiple memory objects by a single module, native exception handling, automatically managed garbage collection, and tails calls. These completely terminate a current function to avoid occupying additional stack memory space. Detailed information on the new features of Wasm 3 can be found on the WebAssembly website.

With version 2, the portable binary format for stack-based virtual machines received its last major update three years ago. Even then, many new functions were added to the W3C standard, including vector instructions, mass storage operations, multiple return values, and simple reference types. Wasm allows any programming language other than JavaScript to be used in the browser, currently especially C/C++ and Rust code, but the new GC functions in Wasm 3 also open it up to Java or Kotlin.

(mma)