So. Creeping along with this. I am posting tihs from a bus.
Learned some more about "textual WASM". Two things I learned. One. It is LISP but also it is Forth. You write it as structurally an S-expression but the commands you write in that S-expression are, as it happens, instructions to a stack machine. This surprised me, but apparently Hotspot was a stack machine, as was the C# CLR as it was based on Hotspot, as is wasm because it was based on… Hotspot. Apparently this works well for JIT.
@mcc Hotspot isn't really a stack machine. *Java bytecode* is written for a stack machine, as is Wasm machine code, which works out well because it's compact: you don't encode (almost) any temporary indices, like you would have in LLVM
the moment you load it, you transform it into a register representation in memory. not literally every implementation does it, but most do not actually execute it with a data stack
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