Skip to content

ewasm/design

Repository files navigation

Ethereum flavored WebAssembly (ewasm)

Specification Revision 4

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.

This repository is also available through ReadTheDocs.

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:

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

Gitter