CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Is WebAssembly magic performance pixie dust?

Add WebAssembly, get performance. Is that how it really works?

The incredibly unsatisfying answer is: It depends. It depends on oh-so-many factors, and I’ll be touching on some of them here.

I really like AssemblyScript (full disclosure: I am one of their backers). It’s a very young language with a small but passionate team that built a custom compiler for a TypeScript-like language targeting WebAssembly. The reason I like AssemblyScript (or ASC for short) is because it allows the average web developer to make use of WebAssembly without having to learn a potentially new language like C++ or Rust. It’s important to note that the language is TypeScript-like. Don’t expect your existing TypeScript code to just compile out of the box. That being said, the language is intentionally mirroring the behaviors and semantics of TypeScript (and therefore JavaScript), which means that the act of “porting” TypeScript to AssemblyScript are often mostly cosmetic, usually just adding type annotations.

I always wondered if there is anything to gain from taking a piece of JavaScript, turning it into AssemblyScript and compiling it to WebAssembly. When my colleague Ingvar sent me a piece of JavaScript code to blur images, I thought that this would be a perfect case study. I ran a quick experiment to see if it’s worth doing a deeper exploration into porting JavaScript to AssemblyScript. And oh boy was it worth it. This article is that deeper exploration.

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Where Next?

Popular Frontend topics Top

First poster: bot
Stock Toolkit: Conclusion :: Brain Dump — Geoff’s Technical Notebook. My toy stock toolkit application is “feature complete” for now. I’...
New
First poster: bot
WebAssembly has been one of the trendiest intermediate representations since a while. However, its definition of safety means preventing...
New
First poster: bot
JavaScript allows calling a function with a different number of arguments than the expected number of parameters, i.e., one can pass fewe...
/js
New
First poster: bot
The Elm Architecture is one of the great innovations Elm brought to the software industry. But one of the questions that often comes up i...
New
First poster: bot
In this article, I will discuss my journey from being an anti-TypeScript developer to a developer who now couldn’t think of going back to...
New
First poster: bot
The TypeScript type system is immensely powerful, and while the language itself is, of course, Turing complete, so is the type system its...
New
First poster: bot
tldr: the level of HTTP/3 support in servers are surprisingly high considering very few clients enable it by default. This thread was...
New
First poster: bot
I had the chance to toy around with Deno recently. And with “toy around” I mean dissecting it into little pieces and see how the sausage ...
New
brainlid
On your LiveView page, you are using a custom component. You want to be able to pass HTML attributes into the component, but the componen...
New
sundi
Learn to customize the Error HTML module in Phoenix LiveView, while enhancing the UX and retaining the typed URLs on branded 404 pages. ...
New

Other popular topics Top

siddhant3030
I’m thinking of buying a monitor that I can rotate to use as a vertical monitor? Also, I want to know if someone is using it for program...
New
brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
New
New
AstonJ
Curious to know which languages and frameworks you’re all thinking about learning next :upside_down_face: Perhaps if there’s enough peop...
New
DevotionGeo
The V Programming Language Simple language for building maintainable programs V is already mentioned couple of times in the forum, but I...
New
AstonJ
Was just curious to see if any were around, found this one: I got 51/100: Not sure if it was meant to buy I am sure at times the b...
New
New
husaindevelop
Inside our android webview app, we are trying to paste the copied content from another app eg (notes) using navigator.clipboard.readtext ...
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New
New