herobird's comments

Wasmi is an independent project nowadays. And you are right that it was originally designed for efficient smart contract execution but with a scope for more general use.

Thank you, that's a good summary of the article!

Even faster startup times can be achieved by so-called in-place interpreters that do not even translate the Wasm binary at all and instead directly execute it without adjustments. Obviously this is slower at execution compared to re-writing interpreters.

Examples for Wasm in-place interpreters are toywasm (https://github.com/yamt/toywasm) or WAMR's classic interpreter.

I was just told that I should state here that I am the author of the article, please ask me anything. :)

For startup performance Wasmi and Wasm3 are both the fastest engines according to the benchmarks. For execution performance you are right that generally JIT engines are expected to be faster than interpreter based Wasm engines.

Also, as stated in the article, on Apple silicon Wasmi currently performs kinda poorly but this will be improved in the future. On AMD server chips Wasmi is the fastest Wasm interpreter.

I see that this sentence was a bit vague. What was meant that Wasmi as a Rust library mirrors the Wasmtime API that can be found here: https://docs.rs/wasmtime/21.0.1/wasmtime/

But yes, Wasmi also supports WASI preview1 and can execute Wasm applications that have been compiled in compliance to WASI preview1.

yep, the title somehow got cut at the end :S