WARDuino: A Dynamic WebAssembly Virtual Machine for Programming Microcontrollers
Reading group: Vincent Leporcher presented "WARDuino: A Dynamic WebAssembly Virtual Machine for Programming Microcontrollers" (SPLASH/MPLR'19) in visio the 5/2/2021 at 10h00.
Abstract
It is extremely hard and time-consuming to make correct and efficient programs for microcontrollers. Usually microcontrollers are programmed in a low level programming language such as C which makes them hard to debug and maintain. To raise the abstraction level, many high level programming languages have provided support for programming microcontrollers. Examples include Python, Lua, C# and JavaScript. Using these languages has the downside that they are orders of magnitude slower than the low-level languages. Moreover, they often provide no remote debugging support.
In this paper we investigate the feasibility of using WebAssembly to program Arduino compatible microcontrollers. Our experiments lead to extending the standard WebAssembly VM with: 1) safe live code updates for functions and data 2) remote debugging support at the VM level 3) programmer configurable (Arduino) modules in order to keep the virtual machine’s footprint as small as possible. The resulting WARDuino VM enables the programmer to have better performance than an interpreted approach while simultaneously increasing the ease of development.
To evaluate our approach, we implemented a simple breakout game and conducted micro benchmarks which show that the VM runs approximately 5 times faster than Espruino, a popular JavaScript interpreter for the ESP32 microcontroller.
