I’ve been working on my language, Saber a lot recently. I figured I should keep some notes on implementation in case someone finds them useful, even if that’s only future-me. Saber is a scripting language intended to be a lightweight row-polymorphic psuedo-functional language that compiles to WebAssembly. Think OCaml meets the best parts of ES6. Of course right now I’m just trying to get basic functionality finished. The compiler is written in Rust.

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. I’ve been working on Saber on and off, but one major development has been strings. Strings were an interesting challenge because they required me to share memory with JS.

I should quickly recap what I’ve done since the last post. I managed to write a basic allocator in pure WebAssembly. From there, I got structs working. The allocator is just some inlined code that checks if we have enough memory, returns a pointer if so, and otherwise grows the memory.

After that I wanted strings, since hey, I could get an official hello world program.

The actual code generation for strings wasn’t terrible. I decided to do pascal style where the first 4 bytes are the length of the string. I guess if the user has a lot of small strings it won’t be that great. Ah well.

I also make sure to have the strings align on 32 bits. That way I can write 4 bytes at a time on the string.

One small hack that I used was to have my allocator code “return” a pointer to the memory in the first global variable. I’m kinda using globals like registers for now.

After that though, I got stuck on printing the strings. How could I print characters without too much trouble? It took a bit and emailing someone for help, but I eventually figured out how to share memory between JS and WASM. Essentially I create a WASM memory object in JS, then import it to WASM. My printString function is written in JS and takes in a pointer. This pointer points to the string in the WASM memory. Since the memory object is still available in JS, I can loop through it as a UInt8Array.

This makes things waaay easier since I can do memory manipulation in JS. Plus JS comes with a TextEncoder class. All I needed to do is copy the string into a new array, run it through the TextEncoder and print it.

Of course this is hella slow since I need to copy the string each time. I could probably cache it somehow. Unfortunately slow interop is a general WebAssembly problem. Hopefully they’ll have a fix sometime soon.

With this, I can finally run hello world!

let hello_world = \() => {
  printString("hello world!");
}