The "CPU" in every browser already has one. This lets garbage-collected languages use that one. That's an enormous savings in code size and development effort.
i don't see the reduced development effort, after all, unless the language is only running on webassembly i still need to implement my own GC for other CPUs.
so most GC-languages being ported to webassembly already have a GC, so what is the benefit of using a provided GC then?
on the other hand i see GC as a feature that could become part of any modern CPU. then the benefit would be large, as any language could use it and wouldn't have to implement their own at all anymore.
Aside from code size the primary benefit on the Web is that the GC provided to wasm is the same one for the outer JavaScript engine, so an object from wasm can stay alive get collected based on whether JS keeps references to it. So it’s not really about providing a GC for a single wasm module (program), its about participating in one cooperatively with other programs.
Writing a GC that performs well often involves making decisions that are tightly coupled to the processor architecture and operating system as well as the language implementation's memory representations for objects. Using a GC that is already present can solve that problem.
> i don't see the reduced development effort, after all, unless the language is only running on webassembly i still need to implement my own GC for other CPUs.
I'd think porting an existing GC to WASM is more effort than using WASM's GC for a GC'd language?
i don't think so. first of all, you don't rewrite your code for every CPU but you just adapt some specific things. most code is just compiled for the new architecture and runs. second, those languages that are already running on wasm have already done the work. so at best new languages who haven't been ported yet will get any benefit from a reduced porting effort.
