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by a9t9 2897 days ago
Just to mention a real life use case: We are using WebAssembly for the image recognition features in our Visual UI Testing browser extension "Kantu". Before switching to WA, we tested many other approaches, including WebGL (old demo here: https://a9t9.com/demo/templatematching.js/ ).

Whatever we tried before, it was either too slow (pure Javascript), too unreliable (WebGL) or required 3rd party installations (C++). Finally, switching to WebAssembly solved all these problems.
1 comments
cpeterso 2897 days ago
Interesting that WebAssembly could have such a big impact on the viability of the web version of your product! How much faster was WebAssembly than JavaScript for your Kantu tests? Were the WebGL issues because not all uses had WebGL enabled or because of GPU-specific quirks?
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a9t9 2897 days ago
Our initial tests were with standard template matching algorithms. With the Javavscript implementation we were stuck in the 60 seconds+ range per image search.

With WebGL it was ~0.5s on a "good" machine and ~6s or "did not work at all" on a "bad" machine. We never figured out why it worked well on one machine, but not so on others. Of course, I am talking only about machines with WebGL enabled ;) This would have been a support nightmare.

With WebAssembly we are now in the 0.1-0.5s range per image search and it just works. So far, we have had exactly 0 WA-related support issues, for both, Chrome and Firefox.

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cpeterso 2896 days ago
60+ seconds to 0.1-0.5 is a pretty nice speedup! :)
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