Frank DENIS random thoughts.

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2021-08-03 06:00:07

Libsodium has been fully supporting WebAssembly as a target for quite a long time. This includes its built-in benchmark suite, that can run both in web browsers and in a variety of standalone WebAssembly runtimes.

The benchmark covers different types of cryptographic primitives. Some are purely computational tasks, some are memory-hard, some require efficient register allocation, some require optimal instruction scheduling, some can greatly benefit from vectorization, some don’t benefit from vectorization at all. It also includes utility functions such as codecs.

At the end of the day, this benchmark may not be a bad representative of how different compilers would optimized real-world code. It can also help quantify the overhead of WebAssembly vs native code.

There are quite a lot of WebAssembly runtimes around. However, in early 2021, most of them are still in early stage, have been abandoned, or don’t support the full specification or WASI.