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wasmi- WebAssembly (Wasm) Interpreter

wasmi is an efficient WebAssembly interpreter with low-overhead and support for embedded environment such as WebAssembly itself.

At Parity we are using wasmi in Substrate as the execution engine for our WebAssembly based smart contracts. Furthermore we run wasmi within the Substrate runtime which is a WebAssembly environment itself and driven via Wasmtime at the time of this writing. As such wasmi's implementation requires a high degree of correctness and Wasm specification conformance.

Since wasmi is relatively lightweight compared to other Wasm virtual machines such as Wasmtime it is also a decent option for initial prototyping.

Distinct Features

The following list states some of the distinct features of wasmi.

• Primarily concerned about
  • correct and deterministic WebAssembly execution.
  • WebAssembly specification compliance.
• Can itself be compiled to and executed via WebAssembly.
• Low-overhead and cross-platform WebAssembly runtime.
• Loosely mirrors the Wasmtime API to act as a drop-in solution.

WebAssembly Proposals

The new wasmi engine supports a variety of WebAssembly proposals and will support even more of them in the future.

Building

Clone wasmi from our official repository and then build using the standard cargo procedure:

git clone https://github.com/paritytech/wasmi.git
cd wasmi
cargo build

Testing

In order to test wasmi you need to initialize and update the Git submodules using:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Alternatively you can provide --recursive flag to git clone command while cloning the repository:

git clone https://github.com/paritytech/wasmi.git ---recursive

After Git submodules have been initialized and updated you can test using:

cargo test --workspace

Development

Before pushing a PR to our repository we would like you to execute the scripts/run-local-ci.sh script that can be found in the repository's root folder.

Supported Platforms

Supported platforms are primarily Linux, MacOS, Windows and WebAssembly.

Use the following command in order to produce a WebAssembly build:

cargo build --no-default-features --target wasm32-unknown-unknown

Production Builds

In order to reap the most performance out of wasmi we highly recommended to compile the wasmi crate using the following Cargo profile:

[profile.release]
lto = "fat"
codegen-units = 1

When compiling for the WebAssembly target we highly recommend to post-optimize wasmi using Binaryen's wasm-opt tool since our experiments displayed a 80-100% performance improvements when executed under Wasmtime and also slightly smaller Wasm binaries.

Benchmarks

In order to benchmark wasmi use the following command:

cargo bench

Note: Benchmarks can be filtered by compile_and_validate, instantiate and execute flags given to cargo bench. For example cargo bench execute will only execute the benchmark tests that test the performance of WebAssembly execution.

License

wasmi is primarily distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the APACHE license (Version 2.0), at your choice.

See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in wasmi by you, as defined in the APACHE 2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.