Fascinating piece of work; thanks! Great comments on V8 JIT optimization in the blog comments that I will apply. Gotta pick up one comment...
"It is an intentionally incredibly sparse language, possibly even relative to other assembly languages."
FYI I'm an old hacker who cut his teeth on 6502 and Z80 hand assembly. No assembler to compile the asm codes to hex machine op codes, no auto calc of relative jumps in hex, hand checking all the hex pointer arithmetic. WebAssembly is higher level, and more like Java or .Net VM bytecodes. But with added checks for secure computing eg no way to touch stack memory directly via ptr arithmetic.
You may find Forth interesting. Especially WAForth: Forth->wasm. Forth is very stack centric, and so is wasm, so they should be a natural match.
"It is an intentionally incredibly sparse language, possibly even relative to other assembly languages."
FYI I'm an old hacker who cut his teeth on 6502 and Z80 hand assembly. No assembler to compile the asm codes to hex machine op codes, no auto calc of relative jumps in hex, hand checking all the hex pointer arithmetic. WebAssembly is higher level, and more like Java or .Net VM bytecodes. But with added checks for secure computing eg no way to touch stack memory directly via ptr arithmetic.
You may find Forth interesting. Especially WAForth: Forth->wasm. Forth is very stack centric, and so is wasm, so they should be a natural match.