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I can address at least the first misconception here - this isn’t transpilation to JS. This is native code that has browser APIs exposed to it, so in theory there should be massive performance wins.


This is also a misconception, it is just a bytecode. asm.js is already running at around 50% native speed so there is no massive performance wins to find. What you get with WebAssembly is reduced startup time because it doesn't have to be parsed first.

The really exciting thing people should be talking about is not WebAssembly but the general availability of SharedArrayBuffer[0] which finally makes it possible to run "foreign" multi-threaded code efficiently.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...




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