[skybrian]

Keep in mind that WebAssembly strings are not JavaScript strings, so there is additional data conversion overhead that needs to be accounted for, versus a JavaScript implementation. And it's not just events and DOM updates. If you wanted to preserve React's render API, the input data for re-rendered DOM needs to be converted from JS before doing a diff.

With slower data conversion and faster internal calculation, it's plausible that it might overall be either slower or faster. I don't see any way to know without doing some experiments. It would certainly be more complicated.

It seems like the sort of JavaScript library where WebAssembly would be an easy win would have low API bandwidth (not much data crossing the boundary) and do a lot of expensive internal calculations. As a UI framework, React does some internal calculations but has relatively high API bandwidth.

[steveklabnik]

WebAssembly doesn't have strings, so you can model them just like JS strings if you want. It really depends on what you want to do.