idel

There was a wasm predecessor (by, well, me) with a bit more of the Forth flavor: https://github.com/darius/idel From >20 years ago and my main regret is a failure to carry it through to be more than a demo.

I don't know -- there were at least a couple papers about it, but I haven't been following. At the time it was first announced I used some of the ideas in one of my projects (https://github.com/darius/idel/blob/master/src/opcodes.awk) but unfortunately didn't develop it further.

Thanks, Chris! Another interesting thing that came out of the object-capability ferment around E and EROS was Darius Bacon's Idel secure virtual machine: https://github.com/darius/idel Though no other software is as influential as JS, other currently influential ocap systems include Genode, most of the current implementations of L4 (including seL4), and CHERI.

At https://github.com/darius/idel is a Wasm-like VM I made in the early 2000s with a Forth-like source syntax and static stack effects. (Tail-call optimization too.) I regret making it a little too simple and then abandoning it -- it seemed too hard to try to get traction with such a thing.

I saw somewhere a short paper presenting a syntax to write programs in essentially SSA directly, which I think was sort of like that, but it's not coming up in a quick search. I'd thought it was by Anton Ertl. FWIW, I used this idea (extended basic blocks are functions with m arguments and n results) in https://github.com/darius/idel with a Forth-like syntax back in 2001.

You might find a few useful ideas in my abandoned project from 15 years ago: https://github.com/darius/idel It was inspired in part by just those agoric papers and meant to grow into supporting that kind of market. It was also designed to be fully deterministic, and included the suspending/serializing you mention (disabled because my first stab at resource accounting for that feature was wrong). It only had a few months of work put into it before I ran out of steam, though. Nowadays Web Assembly seems closest (and much further along), though it abandoned full determinism. Kragen Sitaker (HN user kragen) posted some interesting ideas about taking advantage of determinism in a platform built for it from the start. He called it Kogluktualuk, but his post seems to have been lost to googling. I think this is a promising direction still.