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I'd love to see this future, but I wonder if a WASM VM can match the performance of something like V8 that is fine-tuned to run a single language well.
by heavyset_go 4y ago
I'd love to see this future, but I wonder if a WASM VM can match the performance of something like V8 that is fine-tuned to run a single language well.
- corysama 4y agoThat’s pretty much the point of WASM, isn’t it? V8 is a billion dollar investment in running as best as possible a language that is very, very difficult to run performantly. WASM instead opens up options to run well languages that are much easier to run performantly.
- heavyset_go 4y agoDefinitely it is, and it does open doors for this, I'm just curious if running say, a JavaScript or Python interpreter on top of WASM would be more performant than V8, given that there could be two layers of VMs, ie the WASM VM and the JS/Python VM running on it. I'd hope that they'd be comparable in performance, especially when it comes to doing client-side web app things in languages other than JavaScript.
- corysama 4y agoThat wouldn’t work out. The C Python interpreter is slower than v8. A WASM Python interpreter would be at most as fast as the native C implementation
- afiori 4y agoCurrently JIT in wasm is incomplete. That is a wasm program cannot modify itself (it would need to create new modules and ask the host to load them with a shared memory) So compiling JS to wasm would probably be limited to the performance of interpreting JS on native