After many long years, the Memory64 proposal for WebAssembly has finally been released in both Firefox 134 and Chrome 133. In short, this proposal adds 64-bit pointers to WebAssembly.
If you are like most readers, you may be wondering: “Why wasn’t WebAssembly 64-bit to begin with?” Yes, it’s the year 2025 and WebAssembly has only just added 64-bit pointers. Why did it take so long, when 64-bit devices are the majority and 8GB of RAM is considered the bare minimum?
It’s easy to think that 64-bit WebAssembly would run better on 64-bit hardware, but unfortunately that’s simply not the case. WebAssembly apps tend to run slower in 64-bit mode than they do in 32-bit mode. This performance penalty depends on the workload, but it can range from just 10% to over 100%—a 2x slowdown just from changing your pointer size.
This is not simply due to a lack of optimization. Instead, the performance of Memory64 is restricted by hardware, operating systems, and the design of WebAssembly itself.
What is Memory64, actually?
To understand why Memory64 is slower, we first must understand how WebAssembly represents memory.
When you compile a program to WebAssembly, the result is a WebAssembly module. A module is analogous to an executable file, and contains all the information needed to bootstrap and run a program, including:
- A description of how much memory will be necessary (the memory section)
- Static data to be copied into memory (the data section)
- The actual WebAssembly bytecode to execute (the code section)
These are encoded in an efficient binary format, but WebAssembly also has an official text syntax used for debugging and direct authoring. This article will use the text syntax. You can convert any WebAssembly module to the text syntax using tools like WABT (wasm2wat) or wasm-tools (wasm-tools print).
Here’s a simple but complete WebAssembly module that allows you to store and load an i32 at address 16 of its memory.
(module
;; Declare a memory with a size of 1 page (64KiB, or 65536 bytes)
(memory 1)
;; Declare, and export, our store function
(func (export "storeAt16") (param i32)
i32.const 16 ;; push address 16 to the stack
local.get 0 ;; get the i32 param and push it to the stack
i32.store ;; store the value to the address
)
;; Declare, and export, our load function
(func (export "loadFrom16") (result i32)
i32.const 16 ;; push address 16 to the stack
i32.load ;; load from the address
)
)
Now let’s modify the program to use Memory64:
(module
;; Declare an i64 memory with a size of 1 page (64KiB, or 65536 bytes)
(memory i64 1)
;; Declare, and export, our store function
(func (export "storeAt16") (param i32)
i64.const 16 ;; push address 16 to the stack
local.get 0 ;; get the i32 param and push it to the stack
i32.store ;; store the value to the address
)
;; Declare, and export, our load function
(func (export "loadFrom16") (result i32)
i64.const 16 ;; push address 16 to the stack
i32.load ;; load from the address
)
)
You can see that our memory declaration now includes i64, indicating that it uses 64-bit addresses. We therefore also change i32.const 16 to i64.const 16. That’s it. This is pretty much the entirety of the Memory64 proposal1.
How is memory implemented?
So why does this tiny change make a difference for performance? We need to understand how WebAssembly engines actually implement memories.
Thankfully, this is very simple. The host (in this case, a browser) simply allocates memory for the WebAssembly module using a system call like mmap or VirtualAlloc. WebAssembly code is then free to read and write within that region, and the host (the browser) ensures that WebAssembly addresses (like 16) are translated to the correct address within the allocated memory.
However, WebAssembly has an important constraint: accessing memory out of bounds will trap, analogous to a segmentation fault (segfault). It is the host’s job to ensure that this happens, and in general it does so with bounds checks. These are simply extra instructions inserted into the machine code on each memory access—the equivalent of writing if (address >= memory.length) { trap(); } before every single load2. You can see this in the actual x64 machine code generated by SpiderMonkey for an i32.load3:
movq 0x08(%r14), %rax ;; load the size of memory from the instance (%r14)
cmp %rax, %rdi ;; compare the address (%rdi) to the limit
jb .load ;; if the address is ok, jump to the load
ud2 ;; trap
.load:
movl (%r15,%rdi,1), %eax ;; load an i32 from memory (%r15 + %rdi)
These instructions have several costs! Besides taking up CPU cycles, they require an extra load from memory, they increase the size of machine code, and they take up branch predictor resources. But they are critical for ensuring the security and correctness of WebAssembly code.
Unless…we could come up with a way to remove them entirely.
How is memory really implemented?
The maximum possible value for a 32-bit integer is about 4 billion. 32-bit pointers therefore allow you to use up to 4GB of memory. The maximum possible value for a 64-bit integer, on the other hand, is about 18 sextillion, allowing you to use up to 18 exabytes of memory. This is truly enormous, tens of millions of times bigger than the memory in even the most advanced consumer machines today. In fact, because this difference is so great, most “64-bit” devices are actually 48-bit in practice, using just 48 bits of the memory address to map from virtual to physical addresses4.
Even a 48-bit memory is enormous: 65,536 times larger than the largest possible 32-bit memory. This gives every process 281 terabytes of address space to work with, even if the device has only a few gigabytes of physical memory.
This means that address space is cheap on 64-bit devices. If you like, you can reserve 4GB of address space from the operating system to ensure that it remains free for later use. Even if most of that memory is never used, this will have little to no impact on most systems.
How do browsers take advantage of this fact? By reserving 4GB of memory for every single WebAssembly module.
In our first example, we declared a 32-bit memory with a size of 64KB. But if you run this example on a 64-bit operating system, the browser will actually reserve 4GB of memory. The first 64KB of this 4GB block will be read-write, and the remaining 3.9999GB will be reserved but inaccessible.
By reserving 4GB of memory for all 32-bit WebAssembly modules, it is impossible to go out of bounds. The largest possible pointer value, 2^32-1, will simply land inside the reserved region of memory and trap. This means that, when running 32-bit wasm on a 64-bit system, we can omit all bounds checks entirely5.
This optimization is impossible for Memory64. The size of the WebAssembly address space is the same as the size of the host address space. Therefore, we must pay the cost of bounds checks on every access, and as a result, Memory64 is slower.
So why use Memory64?
The only reason to use Memory64 is if you actually need more than 4GB of memory.
Memory64 won’t make your code faster or more “modern”. 64-bit pointers in WebAssembly simply allow you to address more memory, at the cost of slower loads and stores.
The performance penalty may diminish over time as engines make optimizations. Bounds checking strategies can be improved, and WebAssembly compilers may be able to eliminate some bounds checks at compile time. But it is impossible to beat the absolute removal of all bounds checks found in 32-bit WebAssembly.
Furthermore, the WebAssembly JS API constrains memories to a maximum size of 16GB. This may be quite disappointing for developers used to native memory limits. Unfortunately, because WebAssembly makes no distinction between “reserved” and “committed” memory, browsers cannot freely allocate large quantities of memory without running into system commit limits.
Still, being able to access 16GB is very useful for some applications. If you need more memory, and can tolerate worse performance, then Memory64 might be the right choice for you.
Where can WebAssembly go from here? Memory64 may be of limited use today, but there are some exciting possibilities for the future:
-
Bounds checks could be better supported in hardware in the future. There has already been some research in this direction—for example, see this 2023 paper by Narayan et. al. With the growing popularity of WebAssembly and other sandboxed VMs, this could be a very impactful change that improves performance while also eliminating the wasted address space from large reservations. (Not all WebAssembly hosts can spend their address space as freely as browsers.)
-
The memory control proposal for WebAssembly, which I co-champion, is exploring new features for WebAssembly memory. While none of the current ideas would remove the need for bounds checks, they could take advantage of virtual memory hardware to enable larger memories, more efficient use of large address spaces (such as reduced fragmentation for memory allocators), or alternative memory allocation techniques.
Memory64 may not matter for most developers today, but we think it is an important stepping stone to an exciting future for memory in WebAssembly.
-
The rest of the proposal fleshes out the
i64mode, for example by modifying instructions likememory.fillto accept eitheri32ori64depending on the memory’s address type. The proposal also adds ani64mode to tables, which are the primary mechanism used for function pointers and indirect calls. For simplicity, they are omitted from this post. ↩ -
In practice the instructions may actually be more complicated, as they also need to account for integer overflow,
offset, andalign. ↩ -
If you’re using the SpiderMonkey JS shell, you can try this yourself by using
wasmDis(func)on any exported WebAssembly function. ↩ -
Some hardware now also supports addresses larger than 48 bits, such as Intel processors with 57-bit addresses and 5-level paging, but this is not yet commonplace. ↩
-
In practice, a few extra pages beyond 4GB will be reserved to account for
offsetandalign, called “guard pages”. We could reserve another 4GB of memory (8GB in total) to account for every possible offset on every possible pointer, but in SpiderMonkey we instead choose to reserve just 32MiB + 64KiB for guard pages and fall back to explicit bounds checks for any offsets larger than this. (In practice, large offsets are very uncommon.) For more information about how we handle bounds checks on each supported platform, see this SMDOC comment (which seems to be slightly out of date), these constants, and this Ion code. It is also worth noting that we fall back to explicit bounds checks whenever we cannot use this allocation scheme, such as on 32-bit devices or resource-constrained mobile phones. ↩
<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Candice Lim and Kate Lindsay are the hosts of ICYMI, Slate’s podcast about internet culture.</figcaption>
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