The Future of WebAssembly Garbage Collection | Ep 17 | WebAssembly Unleashed

Join Joel Moses, Oscar Spencer, and Matt Yacobucci as they discuss the latest news and recent developments in WebAssembly, such as Zig 0.140 and projects like running Linux inside a PDF file. This episode features special guest Nick Fitzgerald, a notable contributor to WasmTime and CraneLift, who explains the concept of garbage collection in programming. The discussion covers garbage collection in the context of WebAssembly, diving into algorithms, their implications, and challenges in implementation. They also touch upon the future of WebAssembly in embedded systems and the broader applications of these technologies in various programming languages like Java and Python. Don't miss this engaging and informative episode! Chapters: 00:00 Welcome to WebAssembly Unleashed 00:57 What's interesting this week in WebAssembly? 02:12 Linux PDF: A WebAssembly Feat 03:29 Understanding Garbage Collection with guest Nick Fitzgerald 05:20 Reference Counting vs Tracing Garbage Collection A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection paper: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590p/05au/p50-bacon.pdf 7:22 What's driving the push to get GC into WebAssembly right now? 10:25 What makes Garbage Collection implementation so difficult? 12:09 Challenges in Garbage Collection Implementation 15:19 Are you bound by the language runtime GC or by the Wasm runtime? 19:32 Challenges in Type Systems Implementation 22:59 Object-Oriented Hierarchies and Python 24:34 Garbage Collection Proposal Insights 31:35 Will the end users have extra work? 32:50 Can GC help with Ahead of time Compiling? 35:11 Fuzz Testing and Bug Fixing 36:05 Custom Page Size Proposal 38:03 Future of Garbage Collection Algorithms Did you miss the WebAssembly Unleashed episode with Gilad Bracha? Check it out here: What WebAssembly can learn from JAVA’s history | Ep5 | WebAssembly Unleashed https://youtu.be/BQjTShpa8VM?si=S4sHWZeRqVIbCdn_ For more from F5's Office of the CTO visit the following sites: Blogs - https://www.f5.com/company/octo Reports - https://www.f5.com/services/resources/reports Meet Your Hosts: Joel Moses | https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelmoses/ | https://community.f5.com/users/joel_moses/398372 Oscar Spencer | https://twitter.com/oscar_spen | https://www.linkedin.com/in/oscarspen/ Matthew Yacobucci | https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-yacobucci-323b4b2/