WebAssembly and Elixir

[IRLeif]

@kelvinst

There’s no BEAM on any web browser

Whooooa!! Very good idea! Do you think it would be hard to write a new browser on top of BEAM? And of course, support to execute any BEAM code? Is there a BEAM-JS for backward-compatibility? So many ideas coming on! That would be heaven!

I just listened to episode 323 of the Software Engineering Radio podcast today and was struck by similar thoughts. They broached the topic of concurrency issues with WebAssembly and how shared-memory () multi-threading (which relies on SharedArrayBuffer) was incapacitated due to unforeseen security issues (SharedArrayBuffer and timing attacks, “Meltdown and Spectre”).

At that point, BEAM dinged in my head.

Either having a web browser built in top of the BEAM or having modern browsers use BEAM as a virtual machine in which to execute WebAssembly or something similar to that. In the extreme, maybe BEAM byte-code could even be a viable alternative to WebAssembly.

Perhaps having Elixir compile to WebAssembly would be interesting. As I understand it, one must use C++ or Rust for that right now (and Go is also adding support for it). WebAssembly has some issues with garbage collection (or, rather, lack thereof) which might make that difficult.