The Road to Winch - Saúl Cabrera, Shopify
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 20/04/2023

The Road to Winch - Saúl Cabrera, Shopify

In this talk Saúl presents his work on Winch, a new baseline compiler in Wasmtime. Ahead-of-time compilation of WebAssembly to machine code is a common optimization technique used in server-side environments to improve the startup of WebAssembly applications. This talk explores — through the lens of Shopify's usage of WebAssembly — why this optimization is not entirely suitable for certain applications and how baseline compilation, a technique initially implemented by browsers, can be leveraged as a complementary technique to improve startup performance in server-side WebAssembly applications. This talk presents a deep-dive into the anatomy of Winch: WebAssembly Intentionally-Non Optimizing Compiler and Host, making an emphasis on which characteristics of its anatomy make this compiler suitable for fast startup.