mem.clear vs mem.fill

[binji]

This topic came up a while ago, and again later.

We decided on set_memory/memset/mem.fill, but IMO this operation makes less sense when you look at the table equivalent, table.fill, since we currently have no good way to provide an immediate value.

Is it better to start with mem.clear and table.clear first, and add mem.fill later if desired?

[rossberg]

I kind of expect that we gonna have table.get/set in a similar timeframe, at which point table.fill would already work. So it may not be worth bothering with adding clear methods.

[binji]

OK, sounds good. For now, I'll move forward with this proposal with mem.fill but without table.fill and will update later when we have something concrete for table.{get,set}.

[lars-t-hansen]

With the reftypes proposal, table.clear == table.fill with ref.null even for table-of-funcref, and there is (as Andreas says) also table.get and table.set to complement that, for table-of-anyref. If it becomes hard to spec table.fill here let's move it into reftypes.

[lars-t-hansen]

table.fill is coming with reference types (WebAssembly/reference-types#14).