<story><title>Measuring the overhead of WebAssembly using libsodium</title><url>https://00f.net/2019/04/09/benchmarking-webassembly-using-libsodium/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>magicalhippo</author><text>&amp;gt; An important point here is that the native code does use SIMD instructions[...]. Whereas the WebAssembly backend doesn’t support these.&lt;p&gt;I understand the reasoning of the author, still it would have been nice to have a comparison with non-SIMD native code for those of us who don&amp;#x27;t keep track of how much the SIMD buys you these day for crypto.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; On a surprising number of tests, Cranelift’s optimizations produced slightly slower code than with optimizations disabled.&lt;p&gt;So how much of this result is WASM and how much is Cranelift? By the sound of it, Cranelift doesn&amp;#x27;t produce very optimal output yet, so should still be potential for significant gains, no?</text></comment>
<story><title>Measuring the overhead of WebAssembly using libsodium</title><url>https://00f.net/2019/04/09/benchmarking-webassembly-using-libsodium/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>black_puppydog</author><text>&amp;gt; The original, native code is extremely fast. Way faster than most applications need.&lt;p&gt;Faster than any &lt;i&gt;one&lt;/i&gt; application needs. But virtually anything I do nowadays uses crypto on some level, and wasm isn&amp;#x27;t only proposed to be used for crypto either. Suddenly, my CPU has to do 2x to 7x the work for the same code, because we collectively decided that using electron and web stuff if the way to go for nearly every mainstream application? I don&amp;#x27;t think so, really.&lt;p&gt;WASM seems to me like some people are simply longing for the old days of flash. I don&amp;#x27;t see why I&amp;#x27;d want it.</text></comment>