davnavr / wacil

A WebAssembly to CIL compiler

wacil

"module.wasm" |> dotnet exec

Yet another experimental compiler that translates WebAssembly files (.wasm) to .NET assemblies/modules (.dll/.netmodule) containing Common Intermediate Language bytecode.

Powered by AsmResolver, a high level library for generating .NET metadata.

Currently, work is focused on supporting most of the features from version 1.0 of the WebAssembly specification, as well as some features in the version 2.0 draft.

The following merged proposals are currently supported:

• The multi-value proposal

The following proposals (that at the time of writing have not yet been standardized) are currently supported:

• The multiple memories proposal

How does it work?

Like other "compilers" from WebAssembly to CIL, WebAssembly instructions are translated to CIL instructions, which is more efficient that simply writing a WASM interpreter in C# or F#. Unlike other compilers however, all modules translated by Wacil include a reference to a runtime library Wacil.Runtime.dll. Having a separate runtime library rather than simply embedding code in the generated assembly has its own drawbacks, but has the advantage of avoiding code duplication.