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OVERVIEW.md

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Building EOS-VM

To build EOS-VM you will need a fully C++17 compliant toolchain.

Since EOS-VM is designed to be a header only library (with the exception of softfloat), building the EOS-VM CMake project is not necessary to use EOS-VM in a C++ project. But, if you would like to use the softfloat capabilities, then building the library is required.

Using The Example Tools

Once you have built EOS-VM you will notice 3 tools in the directory build/tools. You can run your test WASMs by executing the command eos-vm-interp <path>/<wasm name>.wasm, this will then run all exported functions within that WASM. You can also run bench-interp <path>/<wasm name>.wasm and get two times in nanoseconds; the time to parse and instantiate your WASM and the time to execute your WASM. The last tool is hello-driver. It is a prebaked in helloworld WASM and uses user input to bound the number of loops the printing occurs and whether it should assert. This tool is an example of how to setup a fully integrated solution with host functions.

These are designed to be modified by the end-user and are simply there to show how to easily integrate EOS-VM into your own project.

Integrating Into Existing CMake Project

Adding EOS-VM as a submodule to your project and adding the subdirectory that contains EOS-VM, and adding eos-vm to the list of link libraries of your executables/libraries is all that is required to integrate into your project. CMake options that can be passed into via command line or with CMake set. These can be found in CMakeLists.txt and modules/EosVMBuildUtils.cmake, or by running ccmake .. instead of cmake ...

Getting Started

  1. Start by creating a type alias of eosio::vm::backend with the host function class type. a) This class takes an additional optional template argument if wanted. By default, i.e. left blank, this will create the interpreter backend. If you set this to eosio::vm::jit, this will create the JIT based backend.
  2. Next you can create a watchdog timer with a specific duration type, and setting the duration to the time interval you need, or use the predefined null_watchdog for unbounded execution.
  3. You should now read the WASM file. The eosio::vm::backend class has a method to read from a file or you can use a std::vector<uint8_t> that already contains the WASM. This gets passed to the constructor of eosio::vm::backend.
  4. You should register and resolve any host functions, please see the Adding Host Functions section.
  5. You can now construct your backend object by passing in the read WASM code and an instance of the registered_host_functions class which houses your imports.
  6. Finally, you can execute a specific export via the () operator of eosio::vm::backend. This takes the host function instance reference, the module name, the export name and typesafe export arguments. (see /tools/interp.cpp and /tools/hello_driver.cpp for more details)

Adding Host Functions

Without any host functions, your WASM execution is going to be very limited (you will not be able to observe side effects or get intermediate values).

There are three options currently for creating "host functions":

  1. C-style function
  2. static method of a class
  3. proper method of a class

Currently, you are limited to only one type of host class to encapsulate your host functions, this limitation will be removed in a future release.

Registered Host Functions Class

Firstly, you should create a type alias to limit the redundant typing needed.

  • using rhf_t = eosio::vm::registered_host_functions<ClassType>;, where ClassType is either nullptr_t if you are only using C-style functions, or the type of the host class. Then, you will add your host functions via rhf_t::add<ClassType, &function_name, wasm_allocator>("module name", "wasm function name"); for each host function.

The last thing to do is to resolve the imports of your module, this is handled by rhf_t::resolve( <reference to module> );.

For a more concise example of this, please see /tools/hello_driver.cpp.