Support for Just-in-Time Compilation of WebAssembly for Embedded Systems

Abstract

WebAssembly gains increasing interest outside the browser, such as in servers or desktops. It also becomes a viable candidate as a managed virtual machine for embedded systems, supported by multiple runtimes. However, the performance of interpreters is limited. Outside embedded systems, just-in-time compilation is used to significantly improve the performance of bytecode execution. Existing WebAssembly runtimes with just-in-time compilation support are either unsuitable for the use on low-resource hardware such as micro-controllers, or they employ a basic compilation strategy that doesn't utilize optimization opportunities and increases the compilation overhead. In this work, we present a micro-controller compatible WebAssembly runtime that supports the general framework for enabling advanced, feedback guided just-in-time compilation and evaluate the memory overhead it incurs on the runtime. Our measurements show that such systems are viable on a variety of low-resource hardware and previous research suggests that a production-ready system is likely to considerably improve the speed of WebAssembly on embedded system-on-chip.