[stromgo]

The paper Mind the Gap: Analyzing the Performance of WebAssembly vs. Native Code reports that, on average, WebAssembly is running at 67% of native speed in Firefox and 53% of native speed in Chrome (called 50% slower and 89% slower in the paper). Whether 67% can be called "near" 100% or not is subjective.

[mntmoss]

For context, these figures are roughly in line with what Java, C#, and other "fast" managed runtimes manage on the Benchmarks Game. [0] Since WASM's MVP is designed towards manual memory management(GC is proposed but not yet specified), there is a good likelihood of the results improving beyond these runtimes.

[0] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

[igouy]

That paper does not report "WebAssembly is running at 67% of native speed in Firefox and 53% of native speed in Chrome".

That paper reports — "… applications compiled to WebAssembly run slower by an average of 50% (Firefox) to 89% (Chrome), with peak slowdowns of 2.6× (Firefox) and 3.14× Chrome)."

When you write "53% of native speed" that's really confusing!

[stromgo]

Sorry, I reformulated the findings for easy consumption. Why is it confusing and not an improvement? Ask 10 people what speed is 89% slower than 100 mph. See how many give the article's intended answer (53 mph).

[igouy]

> Ask 10 people what speed…

Have you done that?