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?
Wasm was designed for just-in-time compilation, so there are some minor complications that make direct execution slightly more involved (e.g., the way branch targets are addressed). Some future extensions, such as garbage collection support, might also be less straightforward, though an implementation will be allowed to not provide those.
But yes, in principle it should be possible (and useful!) to implement Wasm in hardware. I am aware of some people/projects looking into this idea, but none of them have announced anything publicly yet.