Files
wasmtime/cranelift
Alex Crichton 65eaca35dd Refactor where results of compilation are stored (#2086)
* Refactor where results of compilation are stored

This commit refactors the internals of compilation in Wasmtime to change
where results of individual function compilation are stored. Previously
compilation resulted in many maps being returned, and compilation
results generally held all these maps together. This commit instead
switches this to have all metadata stored in a `CompiledFunction`
instead of having a separate map for each item that can be stored.

The motivation for this is primarily to help out with future
module-linking-related PRs. What exactly "module level" is depends on
how we interpret modules and how many modules are in play, so it's a bit
easier for operations in wasmtime to work at the function level where
possible. This means that we don't have to pass around multiple
different maps and a function index, but instead just one map or just
one entry representing a compiled function.

Additionally this change updates where the parallelism of compilation
happens, pushing it into `wasmtime-jit` instead of `wasmtime-environ`.
This is another goal where `wasmtime-jit` will have more knowledge about
module-level pieces with module linking in play. User-facing-wise this
should be the same in terms of parallel compilation, though.

The ultimate goal of this refactoring is to make it easier for the
results of compilation to actually be a set of wasm modules. This means
we won't be able to have a map-per-metadata where the primary key is the
function index, because there will be many modules within one "object
file".

* Don't clear out fields, just don't store them

Persist a smaller set of fields in `CompilationArtifacts` instead of
trying to clear fields out and dynamically not accessing them.
2020-08-03 12:20:51 -05:00
..
2020-07-17 12:03:17 +02:00

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.

Build Status Fuzzit Status Chat Minimum rustc 1.37 Documentation Status

For more information, see the documentation.

For an example of how to use the JIT, see the SimpleJIT 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 functions, although it needs to be used within an external WebAssembly embedding to be part of a complete WebAssembly implementation.

The x86-64 backend is currently the most complete and stable; other architectures are in various stages of development. Cranelift currently supports both the System V AMD64 ABI calling convention used on many platforms and the Windows x64 calling convention. The performance of code produced by Cranelift is not yet impressive, though we have plans to fix that.

The core codegen crates have minimal dependencies, support no_std mode (see below), and do not require any host floating-point support, and do not use callstack recursion.

Cranelift does not yet perform mitigations for Spectre or related security issues, though it may do so in the future. It does not currently make any security-relevant instruction timing guarantees. It has seen a fair amount of testing and fuzzing, although more work is needed before it would be ready for a production use case.

Cranelift's APIs are not yet stable.

Cranelift currently requires Rust 1.37 or later to build.

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 are:

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.

Building with no_std

The following crates support `no_std`, although they do depend on liballoc:

  • cranelift-entity
  • cranelift-bforest
  • cranelift-codegen
  • cranelift-frontend
  • cranelift-native
  • cranelift-wasm
  • cranelift-module
  • cranelift-preopt
  • cranelift

To use no_std mode, disable the std feature and enable the core feature. This currently requires nightly rust.

For example, to build `cranelift-codegen`:

cd cranelift-codegen
cargo build --no-default-features --features core

Or, when using cranelift-codegen as a dependency (in Cargo.toml):

[dependency.cranelift-codegen]
...
default-features = false
features = ["core"]

no_std support is currently "best effort". We won't try to break it, and we'll accept patches fixing problems, however we don't expect all developers to build and test no_std when submitting patches. Accordingly, the ./test-all.sh script does not test no_std.

There is a separate ./test-no_std.sh script that tests the no_std support in packages which support it.

It's important to note that cranelift still needs liballoc to compile. Thus, whatever environment is used must implement an allocator.

Also, to allow the use of HashMaps with no_std, an external crate called hashmap_core is pulled in (via the core feature). This is mostly the same as std::collections::HashMap, except that it doesn't have DOS protection. Just something to think about.

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: