JavaScript or WebAssembly: Which Is More Energy Efficient and Faster?
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Which runs faster and is more energy-efficient: JavaScript or WebAssembly? The University of Minho in Portugal researched this very question and came to the conclusion that while JavaScript can be more energy efficient and faster than Wasm when it comes to in-lab micro-benchmarks, in real applications Wasm outshines JavaScript on speed and energy efficiency — sometimes by as much as 30% on average.
“Wasm is still in its infancy and only time could tell us how it will evolve,” study author João De Macedo, a software engineer, told The New Stack via email. “In our wildest predictions, we see Wasm completely pushing out native apps from operating systems and crowning the web browser as the operating system of the twenty-first century.”
“A micro-benchmark is a program that tracks and measures the performance of a single well-defined task such as elapsed time, rate of operation, bandwidth, etc.,” De Macedo explained. “Micro-benchmarking is one of the principal ways to measure the performance of a software system, thus, Wasm is no exception.
