Embedded Limbo Dancing with Wasm - Dominik Tacke, Siemens AG & Keith Winstein, Stanford University

Embedded Limbo Dancing with Wasm - Dominik Tacke, Siemens AG & Keith Winstein, Stanford University What’s the smallest possible footprint for a WebAssembly application on an embedded device? This talk aims to answer just that. Wasm has some great advantages, including its polyglot nature: the ability to compile multiple languages to the same target, allowing developers unfamiliar with embedded C to program tiny devices, and dynamically load applications on target devices. But this comes at a cost: the footprint of the runtime and the overhead of our chosen languages. What if we could reduce this overhead to the bare minimum? A less-well-known but valuable Wasm feature is that (unlike with Java, JavaScript, Python, etc.) Wasm’s “runtime” can be extraordinarily minimal—almost zero in size. Join as we demonstrate how to make a Wasm runtime“limbo dance”, reducing its overhead to under 5 kilobytes of ROM and a few hundreds of bytes of RAM, and even lower still with some sacrifices.