I get 165ms for my 8-bit homecomputer emulator which is 534KB compressed asm.js (http://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/), and it seems the first call into the code takes another 500ms on Chrome (probably for JIT warmup). Bigger apps like UE4 or Unity demos are several times bigger and can take seconds to compile.

If you are using ms as a unit you several orders of magnitudes too slow for many domains.

3d gaming comes to mind, most games have a tight budget of 16ms per frame, and at those speeds 0.1 ms is a real chunk of that. If I am going to download a new module in then try to load it the game shouldn't have to hiccup for that.

The partial intent of WASM is to write things orders of magnitude larger than jQuery. Whether or not it will ever be practical to ship e.g. a complete Photoshop clone in a browser remains to be seen, but if that's your goal then you do have to start worrying about things like parse time.

Why would the whole Photoshop be downloaded and compiled? I would expect a web app to only download the parts the I use. If I want to blur an image, I don't need the other gazillion filters for example.

And hey, even if photoshop is 1000 times bigger then jquery - that would still compile in one tenth of a second.

Developers like you are why apps are slow when they don't need to be.

EDIT: Also, if you think 10%-20% smaller downloads aren't worth it, you're clearly not working at a CDN.

jQuery is tiny. https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.2.1.js is 268KB; the minified version at https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.2.1.min.js is 86KB, 30KB after gzip compression.

For asm.js/webassembly we're talking about source code sizes in the multiple megabytes range after gzip compression.