> I'm curious, why would you think it would run slower. Because every browser already has an integrated highly-tuned JS VM containing several years of advanced

> I'm curious, why would you think it would run slower. Because every browser already has an integrated highly-tuned JS VM containing several years of advanced compiler research, including JIT's with runtime type profiling, type inference, type-specialized code generation that's highly optimized around JavaScript semantics in order to get today's JavaScript performance. That doesn't exist in WebAssembly which is a low-level statically-typed language that's effectively a compact binary form of asm.js for non-GC statically typed languages like C/C++. > WebAssembly is still a ways off but I'm excited at the possibilities. There is for C/C++ but none for running JavaScript which is worse in every way. WebAssembly is thrown around as some intangible moniker that will magically make everything better without understanding what it is and what it would take to implement a dynamic language with it, esp. JS which already has access to the best VM's the world's best compiler engineers can create.