[fulafel]

WebAssembly is slower than native too, how does it currently compare to Lua with a comparably safe & high level language?

[miohtama]

Here an emulator author benchmarks Wasm implementation against JavaScript and Closure (2018).

Wasm is 1.5x - 11x faster depending on a browser and such.

Here is a very technical 2019 paper comparing Wasm against native compilation. Wasm is 1.5x slower than bare metal https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc19-jangda.pdf

[fulafel]

I think the first link is missing? But emulators are pretty unrepresentative for this use case and they're often written in low-level & unsafe languages.

The second is about benchmarking C, I suspect it doesn't give us a lot of information in this question either.