WebAssembly

A binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine

Distributed Invocation

Source and talk on Homestar

We can imagine WASM modules as functions that execute some behaviour. If we content address it, we now have a consistent way of referring to the same computation. We can imagine a particular WASM module call with a set of parameters as a suspended closure that is deterministic¹.

Then, if we know we’ve ran that module with a specific set of parameters and have a receipt that it produced a certain result, we can be sure that we can just use the result instead of doing the computation again. Memoization at global scale!

Once we have a way for compute to be orchestrated at a global scale (e.g. IPVM through Homestar), this means we pretty much have a global mapping from source code + arguments to result.

This actually gives us superlinear results as we increase concurrency (opposite of what the Universal Scaling Law says! BitTorrent does this too)

Nondeterminism

Nondeterministic execution can only occur in a small number of well-defined cases (described below) and, in those cases, the implementation may select from a limited set of possible behaviors.

See a list of nondeterministic behaviours in WASM

Footnotes

1. See point on nondeterminism ↩