Guide for C/C++ developers
WebAssembly is being designed to support C and C++ code well, right from the start in the MVP. The following explains the outlook for C and C++ developers.
Porting C and C++ code to WebAssembly
Platform features
WebAssembly has a pretty conventional ISA: 8-bit bytes, two’s complement integers, little-endian, and a lot of other normal properties. Reasonably portable C/C++ code should port to WebAssembly without difficultly.
WebAssembly has 32-bit and 64-bit architecture variants, called wasm32 and wasm64. wasm32 has an ILP32 data model, meaning that int, long, and pointer types are all 32-bit, while the long long type is 64-bit. wasm64 has an LP64 data model, meaning that long and pointer types will be 64-bit, while int is 32-bit.
The MVP will support only wasm32; support for wasm64 will be added in the future to support 64-bit address spaces.
float and double are the IEEE 754-2008 single- and double-precision types, which are native in WebAssembly. long double is the IEEE 754-2008 quad-precision type, which is a software-emulated type. WebAssembly does not have a builtin quad-precision type or associated operators. The long double type here is software-emulated in library code linked into WebAssembly applications that need it.
For performance and compatibility with other platforms, float and double are recommended for most uses.
Language Support
C and C++ language conformance is largely determined by individual compiler support, but WebAssembly includes all the functionality that popular C and C++ compilers need to support high-quality implementations.
While the MVP will be fully functional, additional features enabling greater performance will be added soon after, including:
Zero-cost C++ exception handling. C++ exceptions can be implemented without this, but this feature will enable them to have lower runtime overhead.
Support for 128-bit SIMD. SIMD will be exposed to C/C++ though explicit APIs such as LLVM’s vector extensions and GCC’s vector extensions, auto-vectorization, and emulated APIs from other platforms such as
<xmmintrin.h>.
APIs
WebAssembly applications can use high-level C/C++ APIs such as the C and C++ standard libraries, OpenGL, SDL, pthreads, and others, just as in normal C/C++ development. Under the covers, these libraries implement their functionality by using low-level facilities provided by WebAssembly implementations. On the Web, they utilize Web APIs (for example, OpenGL is executed on WebGL, libc date and time methods use the browser’s Date functionality, etc.). In other contexts, other low-level mechanisms may be used.
ABIs
In the MVP, WebAssembly does not yet have a stable ABI for libraries. Developers will need to ensure that all code linked into an application are compiled with the same compiler and options.
In the future, when WebAssembly is extended to support dynamic linking, stable ABIs are expected to be defined in accompaniment.
Undefined and Implementation-defined Behavior
Undefined Behavior
WebAssembly doesn’t change the C or C++ languages. Things which cause undefined behavior in C or C++ are still bugs when compiling for WebAssembly even when the corresponding behavior in WebAssembly itself is defined. C and C++ optimizers still assume that undefined behavior won’t occur, so such bugs can still lead to surprising behavior.
For example, while unaligned memory access is fully defined in WebAssembly, C and C++ compilers make no guarantee that a (non-packed) unaligned memory access at the source level is harmlessly translated into an unaligned memory access in WebAssembly. And in practice, popular C and C++ compilers do optimize on the assumption that alignment rules are followed, meaning that they don’t always preserve program behavior otherwise.
On WebAssembly, the primary nondeterminism and security invariants are always maintained. Demons can’t actually fly out your nose, as that would constitute an escape from the sandbox. And, callstacks can’t become corrupted.
Other than that, programs which invoke undefined behavior at the source language level may be compiled into WebAssembly programs which do anything else, including corrupting the contents of the application’s linear memory, calling APIs with arbitrary parameters, hanging, trapping, or consuming arbitrary amounts of resources (within the limits).
Tools are being developed and ported to help developers find and fix such bugs in their code.
Implementation-Defined Behavior
Most implementation-defined behavior in C and C++ is dependent on the compiler rather than on the underlying platform. For those details that are dependent on the platform, on WebAssembly they follow naturally from having 8-bit bytes, 32-bit and 64-bit two’s complement integers, and 32-bit and 64-bit IEEE-754-2008-style floating point support.
Portability of compiled code
WebAssembly can be efficiently implemented on a wide variety of platforms, provided they can satisfy certain basic expectations.
WebAssembly has very limited nondeterminism, so it is expected that compiled WebAssembly programs will behave very consistently across different implementations, and across different versions of the same implementation.