013b35ff32
* Enable the native target by default in winch
Match cranelift-codegen's build script where if no architecture is
explicitly enabled then the host architecture is implicitly enabled.
* Refactor Cranelift's ISA builder to share more with Winch
This commit refactors the `Builder` type to have a type parameter
representing the finished ISA with Cranelift and Winch having their own
typedefs for `Builder` to represent their own builders. The intention is
to use this shared functionality to produce more shared code between the
two codegen backends.
* Moving compiler shared components to a separate crate
* Restore native flag inference in compiler building
This fixes an oversight from the previous commits to use
`cranelift-native` to infer flags for the native host when using default
settings with Wasmtime.
* Move `Compiler::page_size_align` into wasmtime-environ
The `cranelift-codegen` crate doesn't need this and winch wants the same
implementation, so shuffle it around so everyone has access to it.
* Fill out `Compiler::{flags, isa_flags}` for Winch
These are easy enough to plumb through with some shared code for
Wasmtime.
* Plumb the `is_branch_protection_enabled` flag for Winch
Just forwarding an isa-specific setting accessor.
* Moving executable creation to shared compiler crate
* Adding builder back in and removing from shared crate
* Refactoring the shared pieces for the `CompilerBuilder`
I decided to move a couple things around from Alex's initial changes.
Instead of having the shared builder do everything, I went back to
having each compiler have a distinct builder implementation. I
refactored most of the flag setting logic into a single shared location,
so we can still reduce the amount of code duplication.
With them being separate, we don't need to maintain things like
`LinkOpts` which Winch doesn't currently use. We also have an avenue to
error when certain flags are sent to Winch if we don't support them. I'm
hoping this will make things more maintainable as we build out Winch.
I'm still unsure about keeping everything shared in a single crate
(`cranelift_shared`). It's starting to feel like this crate is doing too
much, which makes it difficult to name. There does seem to be a need for
two distinct abstraction: creating the final executable and the handling
of shared/ISA flags when building the compiler. I could make them into
two separate crates, but there doesn't seem to be enough there yet to
justify it.
* Documentation updates, and renaming the finish method
* Adding back in a default temporarily to pass tests, and removing some unused imports
* Fixing winch tests with wrong method name
* Removing unused imports from codegen shared crate
* Apply documentation formatting updates
Co-authored-by: Saúl Cabrera <saulecabrera@gmail.com>
* Adding back in cranelift_native flag inferring
* Adding new shared crate to publish list
* Adding write feature to pass cargo check
---------
Co-authored-by: Alex Crichton <alex@alexcrichton.com>
Co-authored-by: Saúl Cabrera <saulecabrera@gmail.com>
Cranelift Code Generator
A Bytecode Alliance project
Cranelift is a low-level retargetable code generator. It translates a target-independent intermediate representation into executable machine code.
For more information, see the documentation.
For an example of how to use the JIT, see the JIT Demo, which implements a toy language.
For an example of how to use Cranelift to run WebAssembly code, see Wasmtime, which implements a standalone, embeddable, VM using Cranelift.
Status
Cranelift currently supports enough functionality to run a wide variety of programs, including all the functionality needed to execute WebAssembly (MVP and various extensions like SIMD), although it needs to be used within an external WebAssembly embedding such as Wasmtime to be part of a complete WebAssembly implementation. It is also usable as a backend for non-WebAssembly use cases: for example, there is an effort to build a Rust compiler backend using Cranelift.
Cranelift is production-ready, and is used in production in several places, all within the context of Wasmtime. It is carefully fuzzed as part of Wasmtime with differential comparison against V8 and the executable Wasm spec, and the register allocator is separately fuzzed with symbolic verification. There is an active effort to formally verify Cranelift's instruction-selection backends. We take security seriously and have a security policy as a part of Bytecode Alliance.
Cranelift has three backends: x86-64, aarch64 (aka ARM64), and s390x (aka IBM Z). All three backends fully support enough functionality for Wasm MVP, and x86-64 and aarch64 fully support SIMD as well. On x86-64, Cranelift supports both the System V AMD64 ABI calling convention used on many platforms and the Windows x64 calling convention. On aarch64, Cranelift supports the standard Linux calling convention and also has specific support for macOS (i.e., M1 / Apple Silicon).
Cranelift's code quality is within range of competitiveness to browser JIT engines' optimizing tiers. A recent paper includes third-party benchmarks of Cranelift, driven by Wasmtime, against V8 and an LLVM-based Wasm engine, WAVM (Fig 22). The speed of Cranelift's generated code is ~2% slower than that of V8 (TurboFan), and ~14% slower than WAVM (LLVM). Its compilation speed, in the same paper, is measured as approximately an order of magnitude faster than WAVM (LLVM). We continue to work to improve both measures.
The core codegen crates have minimal dependencies and are carefully written to handle malicious or arbitrary compiler input: in particular, they do not use callstack recursion.
Cranelift performs some basic mitigations for Spectre attacks on heap bounds checks, table bounds checks, and indirect branch bounds checks; see #1032 for more.
Cranelift's APIs are not yet considered stable, though we do follow semantic-versioning (semver) with minor-version patch releases.
Cranelift generally requires the latest stable Rust to build as a policy, and is tested as such, but we can incorporate fixes for compilation with older Rust versions on a best-effort basis.
Contributing
If you're interested in contributing to Cranelift: thank you! We have a contributing guide which will help you getting involved in the Cranelift project.
Planned uses
Cranelift is designed to be a code generator for WebAssembly, but it is general enough to be useful elsewhere too. The initial planned uses that affected its design were:
- Wasmtime non-Web wasm engine.
- Debug build backend for the Rust compiler.
- WebAssembly compiler for the SpiderMonkey engine in Firefox (currently not planned anymore; SpiderMonkey team may re-assess in the future).
- Backend for the IonMonkey JavaScript JIT compiler in Firefox (currently not planned anymore; SpiderMonkey team may re-assess in the future).
Building Cranelift
Cranelift uses a conventional Cargo build process.
Cranelift consists of a collection of crates, and uses a Cargo
Workspace,
so for some cargo commands, such as cargo test, the --all is needed
to tell cargo to visit all of the crates.
test-all.sh at the top level is a script which runs all the cargo
tests and also performs code format, lint, and documentation checks.
Log configuration
Cranelift uses the log crate to log messages at various levels. It doesn't
specify any maximal logging level, so embedders can choose what it should be;
however, this can have an impact of Cranelift's code size. You can use log
features to reduce the maximum logging level. For instance if you want to limit
the level of logging to warn messages and above in release mode:
[dependency.log]
...
features = ["release_max_level_warn"]
Editor Support
Editor support for working with Cranelift IR (clif) files: