Hardware implementations of WebAssembly

Question

I have been poking around some websites, and discovered WebAssembly, and was intrigued by the fact that, to be implemented, a virtual machine is created, along with instruction sets.

Is it theoretically possible to make a WebAssembly implementation in hardware? Does the vm lack any capabilities that could not be solved by external functions?

Answer 1

Theoretically yes, and someone started to develop an initial implementation for an FPGA called WASM Metal but I believe has since been abandoned. Notably, folks like Brendan Eich are skeptical of the utility of it.