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This is the implementation of https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/4155, using the "inverted API" approach suggested by @cfallin (thanks!) in Cranelift, and trait object to provide a backend for an all-included experience in Wasmtime. After the suggestion of Chris, `Function` has been split into mostly two parts: - on the one hand, `FunctionStencil` contains all the fields required during compilation, and that act as a compilation cache key: if two function stencils are the same, then the result of their compilation (`CompiledCodeBase<Stencil>`) will be the same. This makes caching trivial, as the only thing to cache is the `FunctionStencil`. - on the other hand, `FunctionParameters` contain the... function parameters that are required to finalize the result of compilation into a `CompiledCode` (aka `CompiledCodeBase<Final>`) with proper final relocations etc., by applying fixups and so on. Most changes are here to accomodate those requirements, in particular that `FunctionStencil` should be `Hash`able to be used as a key in the cache: - most source locations are now relative to a base source location in the function, and as such they're encoded as `RelSourceLoc` in the `FunctionStencil`. This required changes so that there's no need to explicitly mark a `SourceLoc` as the base source location, it's automatically detected instead the first time a non-default `SourceLoc` is set. - user-defined external names in the `FunctionStencil` (aka before this patch `ExternalName::User { namespace, index }`) are now references into an external table of `UserExternalNameRef -> UserExternalName`, present in the `FunctionParameters`, and must be explicitly declared using `Function::declare_imported_user_function`. - some refactorings have been made for function names: - `ExternalName` was used as the type for a `Function`'s name; while it thus allowed `ExternalName::Libcall` in this place, this would have been quite confusing to use it there. Instead, a new enum `UserFuncName` is introduced for this name, that's either a user-defined function name (the above `UserExternalName`) or a test case name. - The future of `ExternalName` is likely to become a full reference into the `FunctionParameters`'s mapping, instead of being "either a handle for user-defined external names, or the thing itself for other variants". I'm running out of time to do this, and this is not trivial as it implies touching ISLE which I'm less familiar with. The cache computes a sha256 hash of the `FunctionStencil`, and uses this as the cache key. No equality check (using `PartialEq`) is performed in addition to the hash being the same, as we hope that this is sufficient data to avoid collisions. A basic fuzz target has been introduced that tries to do the bare minimum: - check that a function successfully compiled and cached will be also successfully reloaded from the cache, and returns the exact same function. - check that a trivial modification in the external mapping of `UserExternalNameRef -> UserExternalName` hits the cache, and that other modifications don't hit the cache. - This last check is less efficient and less likely to happen, so probably should be rethought a bit. Thanks to both @alexcrichton and @cfallin for your very useful feedback on Zulip. Some numbers show that for a large wasm module we're using internally, this is a 20% compile-time speedup, because so many `FunctionStencil`s are the same, even within a single module. For a group of modules that have a lot of code in common, we get hit rates up to 70% when they're used together. When a single function changes in a wasm module, every other function is reloaded; that's still slower than I expect (between 10% and 50% of the overall compile time), so there's likely room for improvement. Fixes #4155.
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: