[eyelidlessness]

This is already being addressed in thread but I’d like to share some “it depends” thoughts based on experience from recent experiments with WASM and N-API. As others here and elsewhere have said, it depends on:

- how compute-heavy your workload is

- how long it runs

- how much you need to pass data back and forth

That last point is hard to overstate. It’s such an overhead that “notoriously slow” (however outdated the notoriety) JS operations like structured clone run circles around highly optimized native-bridge/WASM data transport solutions.

It’s such an overhead that—for short bursty interop around values that can’t meaningfully benefit from being passed through—you have to write JS that might as well be native integer wrangling but has to be written in JS to reduce the cross-talk. That covers pretty much any workload that involves passing around JS functions as values, or preserving inheritance chains, or dynamic usage of functions generally.

I’m excited about WASM and other JS<->compiled interop, it has a bright future. But unless and until JS as a standard and JS VMs at runtime specifically provide ways to optimize crossing that boundary, the vast majority of already hard to optimize JS use cases are either better solved natively in general with minimal interop (where WASM et al will shine) or better solved by optimizing the JS implementation where the use case necessarily deals with JS functions.