02-state-of-the-art.md

Analysis of the state-of-the-art

As of Fall 2021.

This document enumerates other WASM-related resources that are relevant to FVM, and analyzes them from the viewpoint of prior art.

WASM resources

• Wasmer.io
• eWASM

eWASM

Some interesting considerations for Blockchain VMs. Work seems to have stalled in 2019.

• WASM syscall interface

WASM-based VMs in other blockchains

• NEAR, including Aurora (EVM for NEAR)
• Polkadot/Substrate
• CosmWasm (Cosmos)
• SVM (Spacemesh)
• Arwen VM (Elrond)
• Aqua VM (Fluence)
• Mokoto (Dfinity)
• ETH2 execution environments/engines -- appears stangant.
• <more>

Substrate

Supports WASM and the EVM, but with separate VMs. It also supports cross-VM calling.

NEAR

WASM based VM, but they're adding EVM support with project Aurora.

Has an async (and parallel?) calling convention. Calling is entirely based on callbacks and promises. Of course, it does all this without closures so it's more like erlang than javascript.

• WASM syscall interface