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Spec interpreter/implementation discrepancy - a local with an invalid type and 0 count

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
wasm
Domain
compilers

Research direction

Start with the linked code-section specification and the reference interpreter, then reproduce the behavior using foo.wasm and compare it with V8, SpiderMonkey, and Wasmtime. Determine whether a zero-count local's type should be validated or discarded, and document the agreed specification or implementation outcome.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

My understanding of the definition of the code section in the online specification is that if an entry in locals has n=0 count that it's discarded and not represented in the AST of a module. This means that the corresponding local's type is parsed, but not validated. The reference interpreter implements this behavior and for this input:

(module binary
  "\00asm\01\00\00\00"

  "\01\04\01\60\00\00"       ;; Type section: 1 type
  "\03\02\01\00"             ;; Function section: 1 function

  "\0a\07"                 ;; code section, 7 bytes
  "\01"                    ;;   1 function body
  "\05"                    ;;   body size, 5 bytes
  "\01"                    ;;     1 locals entry
  "\00"                    ;;       count: 0
  "\63\01"                 ;;       type: (ref null 1) -- not a valid type index
  "\0b"                    ;;     end
)

the spec interpreter passes. This same module (foo.wasm) does not validate in V8, SpiderMonkey, or Wasmtime, however. These engines all validate the local's type and reject the module saying that it's out-of-bounds.

I wanted to raise this as an issue to see if others have thoughts about this. I don't have a preference for how exactly to go here myself.

Dominant language
WebAssembly
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