WAT the heck

I had a conversation with a buddy in work about the performance differences between WASM and JS that started like something like this: THEM: Hey, team X has had some really good wins with WASM, they’re saying it’s a lot faster than their JS implementation. Should we be thinking about developers using WASM as their preferred runtime? ME: huh. I’m not sure. What’s the data? THEM: Outside of team X, it’s not clear either way because I’ve never seen a clear comparison. ME: Err… I wasn’t planning to do this, but let me go and play. The issue now is that I had a mindworm that I had to try and get an answer to and more importantly I have an LLM-shaped hammer. So my LLM-shapped hammer squashed the worm. I built a benchmark suite that helped me test and validate some of the questions that we had… And you know what, I have some data, but it needs a lot more validation, but it turns out it’s not the most interesting point of the story. Btw, the code is on GitHub if you want to look. The project…