When WebAssembly Outperforms JavaScript
Wasm wins on sustained numeric kernels, tight memory-layout control, predictable no-deopt performance, and reusing mature native codebases; it loses when work is DOM-heavy, string-heavy, or so chatty that boundary crossings and copies eat the gains, since modern JS JITs are within ~1.5x on ordinary code. The honest decision procedure is: profile first, and count the boundary tax before crediting the speedup.
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Wasm wins on sustained numeric kernels, tight memory-layout control, predictable no-deopt performance, and reusing mature native codebases; it loses when work is DOM-heavy, string-heavy, or so chatty that boundary crossings and copies eat the gains, since modern JS JITs are within ~1.5x on ordinary code. The honest decision procedure is: profile first, and count the boundary tax before crediting the speedup.
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