Not So Fast: Analyzing the Performance of WebAssembly vs. Native Code

Abhinav Jangda, Bobby Powers, Emery Berger, and Arjun Guha
USENIX ;login:, 2019

WebAssembly is a new low-level programming language, supported by all major browsers, that complements JavaScript and is designed to provide performance parity with native code. We developed Browsix-Wasm, a “UNIX kernel in a web page” that works on unmodified browsers and supports programs compiled to WebAssembly. Using Browsix-Wasm, we ran the SPEC CPU benchmarks in the browser and investigated the performance of WebAssembly in detail.

  @article{jangda:not-so-fast-login,
    title = "Not {S}o {F}ast: Analyzing the Performance of {WebAssembly} vs.
             Native Code",
    author = "Abhinav Jangda and Bobby Powers and Emery Berger and
              Arjun Guha",
    journal = "{USENIX} ;login:",
    volume = 44,
    number = 3,
    pages = {12--16},
    year = 2019
  }