Исследование WebAssembly и сравнение производительности с JavaScript

Abstract

Over the long history of the Internet, JavaScript has been the primary programming language in web development. Because of its simple syntax and support in all popular browsers, the language has gained popularity among the developers. However, as computer power and user demands evolved, simple sites turned into the web applications that are full-fledged analogues of the desktop applications. As capabilities grew, so did the performance requirements of such programs. Browser engines have developed ways to optimize the code they run, and intense competition between browsers has contributed to a qualitative increase in performance. Despite all the ways to increase the speed of execution of JavaScript code, the main stopping factor was the dynamic typing of the language. Because of dynamic typing, the browser engine needs to check each time the program is executed whether the variable is an integer, a float, or any other valid type. Thus, each JavaScript instruction has to go through several type checks and conversions, which slows down the execution. This led to the idea of using languages with strict typing, which could compensate for this drawback. But the browser engines cannot execute the code of other languages, that is why there appeared the technology WebAssembly. It allows writing code in languages with static typing, and then parses it into 
 a more native and machine-readable format, which speeds up execution of programs compared to JavaScript. The technology is cross-platform and supports the main programming languages: C++, C, Java, C#. WebAssembly is also implemented using JavaScript, which allows to use the concise JavaScript syntax and computing power of WebAssembly together.