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- Hacker News
- ... in browsers. Which at best JIT compile. There are several WASM runtimes that AOT compile and have significantly better performance (e.g. ~5-10% slower).
The title is highly misleading.
by turbolent - could you please name them?by chalcolithic
- Browsers have been doing (sometimes tiered) AOT compilation since wasm inception.by padenot
- Just means the browsers can catch up.
Initially slower but then faster after full compilation
by pyrolistical - It’s not misleading to measure the performance of WebAssembly in a web browser.by astafrig
- Yeah, I've seen this when test Rust code compiled into native and wasm. I don't know about 45% though, I haven't measured it.by ModernMech
- (2019)by fanf2
- I have built Fibonacci wasm wasi executable for Rust. When I execute it in https://exaequos.com (with wex runtime under development), it is faster than the native app on my MacBookby baudaux
- This is pretty good actually considering the low hanging optimizer optimizations left and that the alternative is JS which generally performs 2-10x slower.
I think vectorization support will narrow the aggregate difference here as a lot of SPEC benefits from auto vectorization if I recall correctly.
by vlovich123 - Really depends on the application. WebAssembly can't use SIMD intrinsics and CPU-specific instructions besides simd128 and what the compiler can do.
At least for cryptography, WebAssembly can be very slow and can hardly provide any guarantee against side channels.
by jedisct1 - The data here is interesting, but bear in mind it is from 2019, and a lot has improved since.by azakai
- 45% slower means..?
Suppose native code takes 2 units of time to execute.
“45% slower” is???
Would it be 45% _more time?_
What would “45% _faster_” mean?
- I guess it is clearer if expressed like "Native application took only x% of WASM equivalent".by tharakam
- 0% slower means "the same speed." The same amount of seconds.
10% slower means "takes 10% longer." 10% more seconds.
So 45% slower than 2 seconds is 1.45 * 2 = 2.9 seconds.
by azakai - It’s a fair point, that way of expressing it is always a bit confusing. Is it the original time plus 45%? Is it 45% of the original speed?
I think it is easier to understand in terms of throughput.
So 45% less work per unit of time, so 55% of the work.
by oersted - What looks like the relevant table has a summary line saying "geometric mean: 1.45x" so I think that in this case "45% slower" means "times are 1.45x as long".
(I think I would generally use "x% slower" to mean "slower by a factor of 1+x/100", and "x% faster" to mean "faster by a factor of 1+x/100", so "x% slower" and "x% faster" are not inverses, you can perfectly well be 300% faster or 300% slower, etc. I less confidently think that this is how most people use such language.)
by gjm11 - 45% slower to run everywhere from a single binary...
I'll take that deal any day!
by icsa - Is compiling so hard?by ori_b
- 45% slower to run everywhere from a single binary... with less security holes, without undefined behavior, and trivial to completely sandbox.
Its definitely a good deal!
by andyferris - That which is old is new again. The wheel keeps turning…
“Wait we can use Java to run anywhere? It’s slow but that’s ok! Let’s ride!”
by gishh - (2019) Popular in:
2019 (250 points, 172 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20458173
2020 (174 points, 205 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19023413
by gnabgib - That it’s not even an order of magnitude slower sounds actually pretty good!by rlili
- 45% slower seems pretty decent considering they use a wasm kernel they developed to mimic the unix kernel so they can run non-modified unix programs inside the browser. It's actually pretty impressive that they did this, and even more impressive that it works and like another commentator said, is not even an order of magnitude slower.
I'm more interested in 1) usages of wasm in the browser that don't involve running unmodified unix programs and 2) wasm outside the browser for compile-once-run-anywhere usecases with sandboxing / security guarantees. Could it be the future for writing native applications?
Languages like Kotlin, C#, Rust, as well as C/C++ etc support wasm quite well. Could we see that be a legitimate target for applications in the future, if the performance gap was closer to 10%-ish? I would personally prefer running wasm binaries with guaranteed (as much as possible ofc) sandboxing compared to raw binaries.
edit: it's from 2019, there have been significant improvements made to wasm since then.
by b_e_n_t_o_n - wasm outside the browser for compile-once-run-anywhere usecases with sandboxing / security guarantees
Please just use Docker in a microVM or whatever. It's 0% slower and 100% more mature.
by wmf - > wasm outside the browser for compile-once-run-anywhere usecases with sandboxing / security guarantees
I've been using it this way for DecentAuth[0]. It's awesome. I compile a single native codebase to wasm, and I can use my library from JS, Go, or Rust. New host languages only require about 1000 lines of glue. I don't have to worry at all about building for different architectures.
by apitman