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WASM can be faster than JS but you need a language that doesn't shoehorn a GC into the compiled binary. I'm not really sure what the author expected here. Modern managed runtimes usually give you the benefit of bump allocation in the nursery for free with a generational GC and the runtime has a lot more room to optimize the GC phase. None of this is possible without a native GC for webassembly.

This isn't WebAssembly being slow the benchmarks just show the overhead of the GC. If you are writing a computationally expensive algorithm in Rust or C++ wasm can be a lot faster but its hard to get close to native performance(i.e. running on bare metal x86/arm).

Our webassembly prototype is about 3-4x faster in raw computation(and that is targeting webassembly exclusively) but has a much higher overhead when interacting with the DOM. That is basically the limiting factor especially on mobile.



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