Well, possibly no faster than can currently be achieved by asm.js if the JIT likes you, but I think discussions of raw speed miss the point.
1. Parsing text based JS is much slower than parsing something like WASM.
2. Initialising data required for programs can take significant time in JS as that data is just a program that must be parsed and run.
3. Those first two points, along with better type support should help things get fast quicker, as the parser and JIT have less work to do.
4. In general JS comes with a lot of baggage that it's extremely hard to get rid of at this point, in many ways it's not really a great foundation to build other things on.
Now, WASM seems to provide a pretty good basis for building many things low level things on, but less useful for higher level languages which might want garbage collection or other facilities. I hope we'll end up with a successor or an evolution of it being the primary thing browsers interact with and JS simply being a language supported on it.
> WASM seems to provide a pretty good basis for building many things low level things on, but less useful for higher level languages which might want garbage collection
Would it be possible to implement a garbage collector in WASM? And could it be a concurrent garbage collector, using advanced techniques such as memory barriers?
It would be cool if we could run e.g. Haskell or Go in WASM. Or even C programs which rely on the Boehm collector.
1. Parsing text based JS is much slower than parsing something like WASM.
2. Initialising data required for programs can take significant time in JS as that data is just a program that must be parsed and run.
3. Those first two points, along with better type support should help things get fast quicker, as the parser and JIT have less work to do.
4. In general JS comes with a lot of baggage that it's extremely hard to get rid of at this point, in many ways it's not really a great foundation to build other things on.
Now, WASM seems to provide a pretty good basis for building many things low level things on, but less useful for higher level languages which might want garbage collection or other facilities. I hope we'll end up with a successor or an evolution of it being the primary thing browsers interact with and JS simply being a language supported on it.