WebAssembly
gc
WebAssembly2017–2026
WebAssembly / gc · Archived
gc
Branch of the spec repo scoped to discussion of GC integration in WebAssembly
57Distinct people
68Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Branch of the spec repo scoped to discussion of GC integration in WebAssembly
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
- dotnet/runtime · linked in 5 of the same discussions
- webassembly/proposals · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- webassembly/reference-types · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:58 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 year68 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-04-29 23:58:05 UTC to 2026-10-21 12:17:44 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 2 | 8 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 1 | 13 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
GC Proposal for WebAssembly
This repository is a clone of github.com/WebAssembly/spec/.
It is meant for discussion, prototype specification and implementation of a proposal to add garbage collection (GC) support to WebAssembly.
See the overview for a high-level summary and rationale of the proposal. Note: the concrete details here are out of date.
See the MVP for an up-to-date overview of the concrete language extensions that are proposed for the first stage of GC support in Wasm.
See the Post-MVP for possible future extensions in later stages.
See the modified spec for the completed spec for the first-stage proposal described in MVP.md.
This repository is based on the function references proposal as a baseline and includes all respective changes.
Original README from upstream repository follows...
spec
This repository holds a prototypical reference implementation for WebAssembly,
which is currently serving as the official specification. Eventually, we expect
to produce a specification either written in human-readable prose or in a formal
specification language.
It also holds the WebAssembly testsuite, which tests numerous aspects of
conformance to the spec.
View the work-in-progress spec at webassembly.github.io/spec.
At this time, the contents of this repository are under development and known
to be "incomplet and inkorrect".
Participation is welcome. Discussions about new features, significant semantic
changes, or any specification change likely to generate substantial discussion
should take place in
the WebAssembly design repository
first, so that this spec repository can remain focused. And please follow the
guidelines for contributing.
citing
For citing WebAssembly in LaTeX, use this bibtex file.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
4 sourcesYou forgot the most important thing: it doesn't need a garbage collector. This is important because wasm garbage collection is a work in progress.
The solution other languages targeting wasm typically use is bundling their own garbage collector in the compiled code, which of course adds a bit of code bloat. E.g. C# blazor wasm applications are not exactly small for this reason.
There was a message yesterday in the Kotlin slack about them starting work on a wasm compiler backend for Kotlin (they already have java, native, and js compilers). https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/tree/master/compiler/ir/... Interestingly they plan to depend on the wasm GC proposal instead of bundling their own: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/
So, things are improving on this front. But it's a big reason why Rust is particularly popular for wasm right now be
Read the rest
cause they have no GC and lots of developer tools that are relatively mature because they've been working on this for a while.
IMHO, this will take another few years to fully mature but inevitably lots of people are going to be writing web applications that don't involve any or very little javascript. Kotlin is starting to look very solid for any kind of cross platform Android, IOS, and web based development (as well as server development, which is what I do). Swift would be another candidate and there already is a wasm compiler for that as well.
Instead of TypeScript which is very far from being all-typed, I hope there will be wider adoption for proper Web languages like ReasonML[1], BuckleScript[2], PureScript[3], Elm[4], etc. With a better WebAssembly adoption and once they solve the garbage collection problem[5] and direct DOM access[6] there will no even need in JavaScript "glue".
[1] https://reasonml.github.io/
[2] https://bucklescript.github.io/
[3] https://www.purescript.org/
[4] https://elm-lang.org/
[5] https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/44#issuecomment-623...
[6] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42628328/wasm-access-dom
In The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017> Presumably WebAssembly would end up with a persistent model, as well, if the GC model went deep enough.
That's not going to happen. The primary point of WebAssembly GC support is for integration with the host, with GC for the guest program secondary. And the biggest WebAssembly host is the browser, which as you note uses a copying collector. A design for WebAssembly GC that doesn't allow that is a non-starter.
Because of this prioritization, extensions like finalizers or weak references aren't even under consideration for the initial version: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...
> My point is merely that the prospect of a glorious execution model that unifies the diverse world of languages is naive.
Hardware already provides this; the whole idea behind WebAssembly and the reason it can support C so well compar
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ed to most other VMs is that it exposes a more hardware-like execution model. Implementing your own GC if WebAssembly's isn't suitable should not be considered a hack, just the usual bundling of the runtime that happens on hardware.