[icebraining]

Why is there a huge overhead to that? And how much is "huge"?

[austincheney]

Because a web browser is essentially an operating system running many internal applications. Simply open an empty browser with a single tab and watch how much memory it consumes. Compare that with a new command shell.

[icebraining]

I think harpocrates was talking about running webassembly programs without the browser.