Chris Fallin came and gave a talk to the Northeastern Programming Research Laboratory last month. He talked about his work on a new project called weval, a WebAssembly partial evaluator (and then helped me write this post!). Partial evaluation is neat. In short, it’s all about taking an existing program, modifying it to hold some of its inputs as constants, and then letting the compiler/optimizer go hog wild on it. The result is still a program—not a value—and it’s usually faster than the origin...