Added

• Added a new validate crate feature to wasmi and wasmi_cli crates. 🚀
  • This feature controls whether Wasmi support Wasm validation.
  • The feature is enabled by default with --no-default-features.
  • Users who have full control over the Wasm inputs to Wasmi may
    have a great need for this as this can reduce binary artifact sizes
    by ~200-300kB.
  • PR: #1902
• Added new libm crate feature to Wasmi. #1860
  • This allows to enforce libm usage.
• Added support to Wasmi CLI to print funcref and externref with null value. #1839
• Add support for hexdec encoded integer args to Wasmi CLI. #1851

Changed

• Wasmi IR operators now store their results in accumulator registers. 🚀
  • With this, Wasmi uses the same interpreter architecture as the fastest Wasm interpreters, Wasm3 and Stitch.
  • Benchmarks concluded that Wasmi is on par and sometimes even exceeds performance of its competition now.
  • PRs:
    • #1827: Definitions for new Wasmi IR
    • #1855: Adjustments Wasmi Translator & Executor
  • Follow-up Optimizations:
    • #1895: Adds specialized i{32,64}.add operator variants.
    • #1896: Adds lowering from isub to iadd operators.
    • #1905: Make more SIMD operators return results in accumulator registers.
• New Wasmi execution optimizations: 🚀
  • Re-designed CodeMap to be lock-free & append-only. #1898
    • Wasmi makes full use of these CodeMap attributes which significantly
      improves Wasm to Wasm function call performance.
  • Only zero-initialize non-parameter function locals upon Wasm call. #1893
    • This significantly improves Wasm to Wasm function call performance.
  • CLI: disallow v128 argument types. #1848
    • With this Wasmi CLI now mirrors Wasmtime CLI's behavior.
  • Improve instance preservation of same-instance calls. #1878
  • Translate ref.is_null via i32.eqz instead of i64.eqz. #1861

Fixed

• Fix operand order in v128_select_ssss translation. #1834
  • Thanks to @shumbo for the fix!
• Fix re-extraction of mem0 after host function calls. #1837
  • Thanks to @npiesco for the fix!
• Fixed incorrect NaN behavior for f{32,64}.{ceil,floor,trunc}. #1860

Internal

• Automatically create release artifacts for Wasmi GitHub releases. #1906
• Added flag to steer LLVM away from bad codegen. #1873
• Added missing std crate feature forward from wasmi to wasmi_ir. #1862
• Update Wasmtime fuzzing oracle to v45. #1867
• Make benchmarks test properly under Windows. #1885
• Fixed a bug that wat based tests were not ignored on !wat. #1883
• Added a whole variety of new Rust based benchmarks:
  • PRs:
    • #1870 : sort, matrix_mul, prime_sieve
    • #1871 : n-body: physics simulation
    • #1872 : argon2: password hashing
    • #1877 :
      • mandelbrot
      • spetralnorm
      • json_parsing
      • compression
      • word_count