Iris-WasmFX: Modular Reasoning for Wasm Stack Switching

Abstract

WasmFX is a proposed extension of Wasm, a low-level portable bytecode, with primitives for explicitly manipulating execution stacks as continuations. By exposing an interface of effect handlers, WasmFX enables non-local control flow features to be compiled in a modular way: one handcrafts a library that directly implements such features in WasmFX, and compilation then merely calls into the library. Alas, code involving non-local control flow is notoriously challenging, and so this proposal raises the questions of the soundness of the language extension, and of the correctness of such handcrafted libraries. In this paper, we first describe WasmFXCert, a mechanisation of WasmFX in Rocq, and prove the expected type soundness result. We then develop Iris-WasmFX, a program logic to reason about Wasm programs that use effect handlers, and illustrate its application to two key use cases of effect handlers: a coroutine library, and a generator. Together, these validate the design of WasmFX, and provide a modular framework for verifying future effect-based libraries.