memory64

The quote is a bit misleading. Traditional WASM (wasm32) does have 64-bit numbers (both a 64-bit integer type, and 64-bit floats), but the address space is limited to 32-bits (and thus pointers are 32-bits too). AFAIK the downside of wasm64 is that it cannot use some virtual memory tricks to get rid of software range checks, so if memory access performance matters and a large address space isn't needed it probably still makes sense to stick with wasm32 even when wasm64 is available. PS: see discussion here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64/issues/3

> For instance, modern operating systems can handle 64-bit numbers. WebAssembly, however, is limited to 32 bits, and can access only 232 bytes (4 gigabytes) of memory. Furthermore, it cannot directly access a computer’s file system or its open network connections. And it’s not multithreaded; many algorithms depend on this form of parallelization, which allows different parts of a computation to be performed simultaneously. “A lot of older code won’t compile into WebAssembly, because it assumes that it can do things that can’t be done,” Stagg says. I am surprised by the memory and 32 bit limitations... Are there plans to overcome them? Edit: found it, https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64

https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64/blob/main/proposals/... For your second one, it looks like it is already implemented in Chromium and Firefox but not Safari. Sadly, it's not new for Apple to be dragging their feet on moving web standards forward. It took what seems like a decade to get proper WebRTC support in Safari.

Indeed, webassembly is moving extremely slowly. I started a project years ago expecting https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory-control/blob/main/prop... and https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64 to be fixed at some point. Neither are yet, and the project still suffers from it to this day. I think wasm is still great without these fixes, but I have lost confidence in the idea that wasm will reach its full potential any time soon.

It's in the works: https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64 Starting with 32bit had some performance advantages because 64bit runtimes can use virtual memory shenanigans to implement bounds checking with zero overhead. In wasm64 they'll have to do explicit bounds checking instead.

Additionally, googlers are championing memory control https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory-control/blob/main/prop..., which provides memory protection, as well as memory 64, which is already done in chrome and firefox https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64/blob/main/proposals/...

Right - currently, everything runs using WASM (32-bit, with 64-bit coming soon [1,2]), and I plan to add support for WebGPU soon! (WebGPU is the successor to WebGL, which is coming out in April 2023 [3]) [1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64/issues/36#issuecomme... [2] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/VomzP... [3] https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/issues/11695#issuec...

Maybe not: https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64/blob/main/proposals/...

As is mentioned in the article, u64 was used to future proof for wasm's upcoming memory64 type: https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64/blob/master/proposal...