Lib.rs

The wasm-bindgen multi-value transformation.

This crate provides a transformation to turn exported functions that use a return pointer into exported functions that use multi-value.

Consider the following function:

#[no_mangle]
pub extern "C" fn pair(a: u32, b: u32) -> [u32; 2] {
    [a, b]
}

LLVM will by default compile this down into the following Wasm:

(func $pair (param i32 i32 i32)
  local.get 0
  local.get 2
  i32.store offset=4
  local.get 0
  local.get 1
  i32.store)

What's happening here is that the function is not directly returning the pair at all, but instead the first i32 parameter is a pointer to some scratch space, and the return value is written into the scratch space. LLVM does this because it doesn't yet have support for multi-value Wasm, and so it only knows how to return a single value at a time.

Ideally, with multi-value, what we would like instead is this:

(func $pair (param i32 i32) (result i32 i32)
  local.get 0
  local.get 1)

However, that's not what this transformation does at the moment. This transformation is a little simpler than mutating existing functions to produce a multi-value result, instead it introduces new functions that wrap the original function and translate the return pointer to multi-value results in this wrapper function.

With our running example, we end up with this:

;; The original function.
(func $pair (param i32 i32 i32)
  local.get 0
  local.get 2
  i32.store offset=4
  local.get 0
  local.get 1
  i32.store)

(func $pairWrapper (param i32 i32) (result i32 i32)
  ;; Our return pointer that points to the scratch space we are allocating
  ;; on the stack for calling `$pair`.
  (local i32)

  ;; Allocate space on the stack for the result.
  global.get $stackPointer
  i32.const 8
  i32.sub
  local.tee 2
  global.set $stackPointer

  ;; Call `$pair` with our allocated stack space for its results.
  local.get 2
  local.get 0
  local.get 1
  call $pair

  ;; Copy the return values from the stack to the Wasm stack.
  local.get 2
  i32.load
  local.get 2 offset=4
  i32.load

  ;; Finally, restore the stack pointer.
  local.get 2
  i32.const 8
  i32.add
  global.set $stackPointer)

This $pairWrapper function is what we actually end up exporting instead of $pair.