[cormacrelf]

Can anyone describe the (overhead) cost of calling into WASM code in the implementations so far? A lot of optimize-able areas are things like RxJS or Promise implementations (eg Bluebird), or generally libraries making the stack trace like [userspace code] -> [library code, approx 20 stack frames] -> [more userspace]. Should we think of the WASM-JS bridge cost like system calls, or like inline assembly?

[josephg]

I'm curious about this too.

I hand-wrote a perlin noise generation function in asmjs when that was the future. Then I called my noise function from a loop in javascript to paint an image (1 call per pixel - about 1M calls). Running the perlin noise code with the asmjs engine in Firefox turned out to be a bit slower than running all the code through FF's regular javascript engine. The asmjs code ran fast, but the FFI overhead at the boundary between JS and asmjs made the system slower overall.

Given how easy it looks, I might try the same experiment with Rust & WASM to see where we're at. That said, this is the sort of thing which can definitely be improved over time.

[Crespyl]

These days it's probably possible to use a buffer in the asmjs/WASM side and generate the image data there, only exporting back to the JS side after the job is complete. That should significantly cut down on the overhead.

[skybrian]

You need to look at serialization overhead for exchanging data. For example, I don't think web assembly has direct access to JavaScript strings? What about JSON?

Seems like you're either converting a lot of strings (which wastes memory) or calling lots of JavaScript string methods from web assembly, which is not likely to be fast in an inner loop.

[cormacrelf]

To be clear, I haven't done anything serious in WASM that would hit any limits here.

[Matthias247]

I guess it will depend heavily on the type of your exchanged parameters. If it's a few integers then it's no problem since both JS and the WASM side can easily read those.

However for complex objects (like Javascript objects, strings or DOM objects) objects you need a serialization mechanism for those. That might be similar to what typical system call implementations do. However system calls mostly have a very simply set of parameters, so transferring Javascript objects might be far worse. If you would want to share Javascript objects on both sides you would also need some kind of reference-counted handles, which can identify the objects.

I haven't done anything with WASM yet, but I'm pretty sure the domains you mentioned (promises, asynchronous programming and also DOM handling) are the ones which will least likely benefit from WASM. Lower level math algorithms might however benefit a lot.