>I'm guessing you are unfamiliar with PNaCl. This is more or less the approach taken by PNaCl; i.e. use LLVM as the starting point for a wire format. It turns out that LLVM IR/bitcode by itself is neither portable nor stable enough to be used for this purpose, and it is designed for compiler optimizations, it has a huge surface area, much more than is needed for this purpose. PNaCl solves these problems by defining a portable target triple (an architecture called "le32" used instead of e.g. i386 or arm), a subset of LLVM IR, and a stable frozen wire format based on LLVM's bitcode. So this approach (while not as simple as "use LLVM-IR directly") does work. However LLVM's IR and bitcode formats were designed (respectively) for use as a compiler IR and for temporary file serialization for link-time optimization. They were not designed for the goals we have, in particular a small compressed distribution format and fast decoding. We think we can do much better for wasm, with the experience we've gained from PNaCl
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