For one thing, the js VM, V8, is extremely good these days. I’ve been very curious about these questions, and in single thread contexts, V8 seems to beat JVM, w

For one thing, the js VM, V8, is extremely good these days. I’ve been very curious about these questions, and in single thread contexts, V8 seems to beat JVM, with compute performance roughly equivalent to Rust in debug mode. Since the bindings to the rest of the “essential” browser model are all geared towards js, the appropriate mental model might be that js is the “assembly” of the browser, even though it is not assembly in any meaningful compute/memory model sense.