Analyzing the Performance of WebAssembly vs. Native Code

That which is old is new again. The wheel keeps turning…

“Wait we can use Java to run anywhere? It’s slow but that’s ok! Let’s ride!”

[dead]

45% slower seems pretty decent considering they use a wasm kernel they developed to mimic the unix kernel so they can run non-modified unix programs inside the browser. It's actually pretty impressive that they did this, and even more impressive that it works and like another commentator said, is not even an order of magnitude slower.

I'm more interested in 1) usages of wasm in the browser that don't involve running unmodified unix programs and 2) wasm outside the browser for compile-once-run-anywhere usecases with sandboxing / security guarantees. Could it be the future for writing native applications?

Languages like Kotlin, C#, Rust, as well as C/C++ etc support wasm quite well. Could we see that be a legitimate target for applications in the future, if the performance gap was closer to 10%-ish? I would personally prefer running wasm binaries with guaranteed (as much as possible ofc) sandboxing compared to raw binaries.

edit: it's from 2019, there have been significant improvements made to wasm since then.

0% slower means "the same speed." The same amount of seconds.

10% slower means "takes 10% longer." 10% more seconds.

So 45% slower than 2 seconds is 1.45 * 2 = 2.9 seconds.

It’s a fair point, that way of expressing it is always a bit confusing. Is it the original time plus 45%? Is it 45% of the original speed?

I think it is easier to understand in terms of throughput.

So 45% less work per unit of time, so 55% of the work.