[dijit]

prefer not to get into a debate about the efficiencies of x vs y but sufficed to say: Computers are only getting negligibly faster over the last 10 years and our software has gotten overall quite considerably slower.

A runtime overhead that slows everything down to 1.5x, even with low hanging fruits is only going to accelerate this issue.

From a consumer perspective: We all act as if everyone has 8-16G of ram, because that's what we're used to, but the reality is that the majority of people have 2-4G of ram, even these days. That's not counting the anemic CPUs that are often inside awful cooling solutions.

From a server perspective: we outsource our Ops to cloud providers and pay a significant premium for computational speed, which means things like runtime overheads have direct costs.

The reason I called it inefficient is because it's not adding anything we don't have, it's just "another layer" with a large runtime overhead.

And, anyway, I'm mainly referring to this talk: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

[hajile]

That talk makes the point that replacing the swiss cheese hardware security models with a software one can shift your performance. You run 1.5x slower, but you also run 1.5x faster by avoiding all the hardware checks. On the whole, you can theoretically run about the same speed, but with better security.

Even better, if WASM takes over the world, you can bake parts of it into hardware and remove a lot of other bottlenecks.