WebAssembly

flexible-vectors

WebAssembly2022–2025

WebAssembly / flexible-vectors

flexible-vectors

Vector operations for WebAssembly

Web Development

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4Distinct people

7Mentions

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60GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Vector operations for WebAssembly

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-02-02 20:53:56 UTC to 2025-05-09 15:31:27 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	3
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

7 sources

singularity2001·May 9, 2025

premature optimization is the root of all evil and this SIMD mess could have been implemented so much more elegantly if they just followed the general variable size flexible vector proposal https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors

In WASM 2.0

singularity2001·May 9, 2025

premature optimization is the root of all evil and this SIMD mess could have been implemented so much more elegantly if they just followed the general variable size wasm flexible vector proposal https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors

In WASM 2.0

leucippe·May 25, 2024

Registers will keep growing. Rather than adding 512 bits to the spec, it's better to choose an abstraction that's portable across hardware, so that modules don't need to be recompiled every few years with the latest and greatest SIMD size. There's a proposal called 'flexible-vectors' which is still in stage 1 (i.e. design phase). Its goal is length-agnostic SIMD. https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors

In Why is WebAssembly not supporting 256/512 SIMD registers?

singularity2001·May 2, 2023

Wonderful language. Only complaints (so far) : DynamicVector should be named Array and SIMD should be named Vector and dispatched to whatever SIMD/vector pipeline the host offers, similar to the Flexible Vectors proposal in WASM: https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors/blob/main/pr... And please make Optional[T] as ergonomic as Swift / Kotlin with a simple '?'

In Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers

singularity2001·Nov 29, 2022

Abstract vectorization instructions in wasm will make life a lot easier https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors/blob/main/pr... great proposal! Mapping to whatever hardware is available as some sort of micro library

In AVX 512 will be the future

sitkack·Jul 25, 2022

I think SIMD was a distraction to our conversation, most code doesn't use it and in the future the length agnostic, flexible vectors; https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors/blob/master/... are a better solution. They are a lot like RVV; https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec, research around vector processing is why RISC-V exists in the first place! I was trying to find the smallest Rust Wasm interpreters I could find, I should have read the source first, I only really use wasmtime, but this one looks very interesting, zero deps, zero unsafe. 16.5kloc of Rust https://github.com/rhysd/wain The most complete wasm env for small devices is wasm3 20kloc of C https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3 I get what you are saying as to be so small that there isn't a place of bugs to hide. > “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One w

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ay is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” CAR Hoare Even a 100 line program can't be guaranteed to be free of bugs. These programs need embedded tests to ensure that the layer below them is functioning as intended. They cannot and should not run open loop. Speaking of 300+ reimplementations, I am sure that RISC-V has already exceeded that. The smallest readable implementation is like 200 lines of code; https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/blob/master/FemtoRV/... I don't think Wasm suffers from the base extension issue you bring up. It will get larger, but 1.0 has the right algebraic properties to be useful forever. Wasm does require an environment, for archival purposes that environment should be written in Wasm, with api for instantiating more envs passed into the first env. There are two solutions to the Wasm generating and calling Wasm problem. First would be a trampoline, where one returns Wasm from the first Wasm program which is then re-instantiated by the outer env. The other would be to pass in the api to create new Wasm envs over existing memory buffers. See, https://copy.sh/v86/ MS-DOS, NES or C64 are useful for archival purposes because they are dead, frozen in time along with a large corpus of software. But there is a ton of complexity in implementing those systems with enough fidelity to run software. Lua, Typed Assembly; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typed_assembly_language and Sector Lisp; https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp seem to have the right minimalism and compactness for archival purposes. Maybe it is sectorlisp+rv32+wasm. If there are directions you would like Wasm to go, I really recommend attending the Wasm CG meetings. https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings When it comes to an archival system, I'd like it to be able to run anything from an era, not just specially crafted binaries. I think Wasm meets that goal. https://gist.github.com/dabeaz/7d8838b54dba5006c58a40fc28da9...

In Take more screenshots

hackthesystem·Feb 2, 2022

Thanks! Good points, I think in general the fixed-width "packed" SIMD ISAs have the downsides that you mentioned. But it seems that WebAssembly doesn't have length-agnostic SIMD instructions yet. There is an open proposal to add this though: https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors

In Exploring SIMD performance improvements in WebAssembly (2021)