On the Runtime and Energy Performance of WebAssembly: Is WebAssembly superior to JavaScript yet?

Macedo, Joao De; Abreu, Rui; Pereira, Rui; Saraiva, João

doi:10.1109/asew52652.2021.00056

Cited by 12 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…A preliminary study of the energetic and run-time behavior of the novel Wasm and the matured JS languages has been reported in [20]. This study, however, considers only a set of micro-benchmarks of heavy computational operations which do not represent typical Web applications.…”

Section: Benchmark Design and Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Micro-benchmarks is one of the principal ways to measuring the performance of a software system. Wasm is no exception, and researchers have presented a preliminary study and its results on the run-time and energy efficiency performance of Wasm versus JS [20]. The considered benchmark programs are originality written in C and compiled into both Wasm and JS.…”

Section: B Micro-benchmark Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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WebAssembly versus JavaScript: Energy and Runtime Performance

Macedo

Abreu²,

Pereira

et al. 2022

2022 International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S)

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The worldwide Web has dramatically evolved in recent years. Web pages are dynamic, expressed by programs written in common programming languages given rise to sophisticated Web applications. Thus, Web browsers are almost operating systems, having to interpret/compile such programs and execute them. Although JavaScript is widely used to express dynamic Web pages, it has several shortcomings and performance inefficiencies. To overcome such limitations, major IT powerhouses are developing a new portable and size/load efficient language: WebAssembly.In this paper, we conduct the first systematic study on the energy and run-time performance of WebAssembly and JavaScript on the Web. We used micro-benchmarks and also real applications in order to have more realistic results. Preliminary results show that WebAssembly, while still in its infancy, is starting to already outperform JavaScript, with much more room to grow. A statistical analysis indicates that WebAssembly produces significant performance differences compared to JavaScript. However, these differences differ between micro-benchmarks and real-world benchmarks. Our results also show that WebAssembly improved energy efficiency by 30%, on average, and showed how different WebAssembly behaviour is among three popular Web Browsers: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. Our findings indicate that WebAssembly is faster than JavaScript and even more energy-efficient. Additionally, our benchmarking framework is also available to allow further research and replication.

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Section: Benchmark Design and Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Micro-benchmark Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%