[stagas]

V8 JS is equally fast or even faster for the same code after 3-4 runs. Cold paths, however, are usually 2 orders of magnitude slower than what you can achieve with WASM, for the same code. So it kind of depends on what you're building. Do you need a <5ms response at all times or can you live with an ~150ms response sometimes? 150ms randomly blocking code can be unacceptable for some cases and WASM doesn't suffer from that.

That said, you can't simply swap certain functions for WASM. There is an overhead for calling WASM functions, though very tiny - so if you're really going for performance then your app should be entirely living in WASM and interfacing directly with native browser APIs.

[jariel]

So that's a good point - however, in some recent benchmarks I've run V8 vs. JS code in GraalVM JS module, it seems that V8 does move to that optimal state fairly quickly, and 3-4 runs for a specific line of code is usually a small price to pay, given the alternative would be to use an entirely different stack, which even a decade in, barely integrates with the host environment - and - one must account for the inevitable 'bridging' costs between WASM and JS domains.

For example, some kind of 'pre optimized' 'JS engine byte code' that a regular JS engine could load as a module - which could be used by any other, regular JS code, would be considerably more optimal in terms of adapting to real world needs.

Oddly, that could probably be done right now if the world just happened to agree on a JS implementation like V8, I'm not suggesting we all do that, but at least we should be aware of the price we are paying.

I give WASM a 50/50 chance of becoming relevant, some of the new APIs may make a big difference, it remains to be seen if they do.

[stagas]

I agree, I'd love to be able to explicitly annotate a certain function for pre-optimization even if there was some initialization cost but that would also guarantee its performance throughout the app's lifetime. I'm not sure if that can be achieved with the dynamic nature of JS. Anecdotally also, in my benchmarks what I observe is that you get optimizations only for things that run consecutively i.e in a loop. When you switch to other paths and return it treats it like a cold path all over again. So when you're switching paths very often you may never get any optimization benefits and then the only option, at least for now, is to use WASM.

Also, all of this without ever mentioning GC, which is extremely hard to avoid using vanilla JS and will certainly cause hiccups.

I also agree that tooling around WASM could be improved but we should give it some time given that it's a fairly new thing (I think it's less than a decade even if you include asm.js). I believe it will become relevant not necessarily because it can run on the web, but because of the feature that it's a sandboxed target environment that is extremely portable. WASM runs almost everywhere already and I think that's it's main winning point and not so much the browser side.