I'm trying to implement a WASM to C compiler, and because of that not-quite-so-stack behavior, I can actually guarantee that it will always build an expression and I don't have to discard or reset stack value! Everything stays within that function, which is very neat, and I think it is one of the reason WAT, the textual format is so neat, that you can represent it with a S-Expression.
Check out wastrel https://codeberg.org/andywingo/wastrel
Of note WASM 3 has garbage collection (GC), multi-memory, exception handling, tail calls and more which can be challenging to implement.
Compiling WASM to C is a really good option: https://00f.net/2023/12/11/webassembly-compilation-to-c/
Shameless plug… compiling it to Go is a great option too: https://github.com/ncruces/wasm2go
I've used it to translate SQLite (with a few extensions) and, that I know of, it's been used (to varying degrees of success) to translate the MARISA trie library (C++), libghostty (Zig), zlib, Perl, and QuickJS.
More on-topic, I use a mix of an unevaluated expression stack and a stack-to-locals approach to translate Wasm.
But how do you handle arguments or loop index variables? Your liveness is the entire function? You have to compile all the WASM chunks together in order to do any optimization? That seems ... problematic.
Edit: Yep. In article referenced from the original: http://troubles.md/posts/wasm-is-not-a-stack-machine/
Double edit: Some of this has already been fixed in WASM: https://github.com/WebAssembly/multi-value