[OCaml'25] Embedding WebAssembly in OCaml for Safe Program Construction

Embedding WebAssembly in OCaml for Safe Program Construction (Video, OCaml 2025) Hunter DeMeyer (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) Abstract: WebAssembly (wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine originally designed to improve the safety and performance of client-side web applications. It has since gained popularity outside of the browser because of its portability and security guarantees. These features make it an ideal encoding for serialized representations of computation, and a critical format for modern programming languages to interface with. While existing OCaml libraries support standards development, symbolic execution, and compiling OCaml to wasm, they lack explicit facilities for manipulating wasm modules. The ability to construct and rewrite wasm code, as provided in Rust by tools such as wasm-bindgen and wirm, would elevate wasm’s utility in the OCaml ecosystem. Leveraging OCaml’s strong typing and powerful type inference can help to er