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A comment on A first look at WebAssembly performance. Parent comment

Re:A first look at WebAssembly performance by MereInterest on Thursday February 09, 2017 @06:38AM (#13606214)
As a comparison, I wrote an identical program in both C++ and JavaScript. It was doing repeated calls to a kd-tree, and was CPU-limited in both cases. The JavaScript version was slower, but only by a factor of 5-7 or so. I was rather surprised, because I was expecting a factor of 100-500, as I get with C++/CPython.

I don't expect WebAssembly to improve much on the speed, because it is already pretty fast.

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Re:A first look at WebAssembly performance by Veedrac on Thursday February 09, 2017 @07:14AM (#13606372)
Javascript engines are fairly speedy compared to CPython; not only are they industrial-grade JITs (as opposed to CPython being a naive interpreter), but JS is an easier language to optimize. Further, WebAssembly has overhead.

5-7x difference seems reasonable to me.

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Re:A first look at WebAssembly performance by fulafel on Friday February 10, 2017 @12:42AM (#13613481)
The CPython interpreter has actually seen a lot of performance work, they've long been pushing the boundaries of interpreter optimizations that you can do portably & compatibly. I wouldn't describe it as a "naive interpreter".
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