Don't know if you need to compile, you might want to but I think interpreting might seem reasonable if size/complexity is a concern.
Is the runtime really that large? I know with wasm 2.0 with garbage collection and exceptions is a bit of a beast but wasm 1.0? What's needed (I'm speaking from a place of ignorance here, I haven't implemented a WASM runtime)? Some contiguous memory, a stack machine, IEEE float math and some utf-8 operations. I think you can add some reasonable limitations like only a single module and a handful of available imports relevant to the domain.
I know that feature creep would almost inevitably follow, but if someone cares about minimizing complexity it seems possible.
Is the runtime really that large? I know with wasm 2.0 with garbage collection and exceptions is a bit of a beast but wasm 1.0? What's needed (I'm speaking from a place of ignorance here, I haven't implemented a WASM runtime)? Some contiguous memory, a stack machine, IEEE float math and some utf-8 operations. I think you can add some reasonable limitations like only a single module and a handful of available imports relevant to the domain.
I know that feature creep would almost inevitably follow, but if someone cares about minimizing complexity it seems possible.