RichWasm: Bringing Safe, Fine-Grained, Shared-Memory Interoperability Down to WebAssembly

Abstract

Safe, shared-memory interoperability between languages with different type systems and memory-safety guarantees is an intricate problem as crossing language boundaries may result in memory-safety violations. In this paper, we present RichWasm, a novel richly typed intermediate language designed to serve as a compilation target for typed high-level languages with different memory-safety guarantees. RichWasm is based on WebAssembly and enables safe shared-memory interoperability by incorporating a variety of type features that support fine-grained memory ownership and sharing. RichWasm is rich enough to serve as a typed compilation target for both typed garbage-collected languages and languages with an ownership-based type system and manually managed memory. We demonstrate this by providing compilers from core ML and L3, a type-safe language with strong updates, to RichWasm. RichWasm is compiled to regular Wasm, allowing for use in existing environments. We formalize RichWasm in Coq and prove type safety.