Jakub Konka

One of Zig's main goals is seamless cross-compilation from any target to any target. This includes macOS and Apple's recent switch from x64 to ARM64 architecture with the introduction of the M1 SoC. This talk will delve deep into the internals of Mach-O linking in ZIg for both x64 and ARM64 targets, discussing new strict requirements the ARM64-version of the XNU kernel places on the binaries such as embedded code signature and inode caching, and how Zig mustered up to address and solve them for fantastic developer experience on macOS.

I hope for this talk to deliver on two fronts: 1) to showcase and convince the audience that Zig takes cross-compilation very seriously and is a language worth learning, and 2) demistify Mach-O linking in general. Yet another great strength of Zig is that it is a very readable language, therefore, even though the code examples will be in Zig, it will not hinder anyone's ability to enjoy figuring out the finer points of Mach-O linking on ARM64 aka the Apple Silicon which are language-agnostic. Finally, there naturally will be coding examples interleaved here and there to demonstrate the different linking concepts that the talk will touch upon.

WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is the new brilliant community effort at standardising the use of WebAssembly (Wasm) outside the browser environment. Initiated by Mozilla, now under the umbrella of Bytecode Alliance, WASI has the potential to revolutionise the way we think about the "build once, run anywhere" in a truly secure manner. But could WASI also lend itself to a task of running any code within a network of distributed, untrusted nodes such as BOINC or Golem Network, and ensuring that the results received are indeed correct? The short answer is yes, if determinism of computations could be enforced which opens many ways at verifying the results. Enforcing determinism is a rather difficult thing to achieve in other platforms such as JVM etc., now possible thanks to Wasm and WASI. This talk will delve deep into the inner workings of the WASI spec, and its goto implementation, the wasi-common library, and explore how and if determinism can be enforced at the WASI syscall level.