Re:Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS (2...
by jerf on Friday June 25, 2021 @09:19AM
(#27630410)
If WASM wasn't faster than Javascript, nobody would care. They would just compile things to the "as fast as C" Javascript, and it would have been done years ago.
We need to redo all this work for WASM precisely because there is no such thing in general as "as fast as C Javascript". Javascript itself is not a suitable target for all those things. A 10x performance haircut off the top, in addition to what it costs to get to even performance that good (JITs tend to eat RAM like candy to get their performance increases on dynamic languages), just wasn't an acceptable base for the things you're talking about.
We need to redo all this work for WASM precisely because there is no such thing in general as "as fast as C Javascript". Javascript itself is not a suitable target for all those things. A 10x performance haircut off the top, in addition to what it costs to get to even performance that good (JITs tend to eat RAM like candy to get their performance increases on dynamic languages), just wasn't an acceptable base for the things you're talking about.