WebAssembly versus JavaScript: Energy and Runtime Performance

Abstract

The worldwide Web has dramatically evolved in recent years. Web pages are dynamic, expressed by programs written in common programming languages given rise to sophisticated Web applications. Thus, Web browsers are almost operating systems, having to interpret/compile such programs and execute them. Although JavaScript is widely used to express dynamic Web pages, it has several shortcomings and performance inefficiencies. To overcome such limitations, major IT powerhouses are developing a new portable and size/load efficient language: WebAssembly.In this paper, we conduct the first systematic study on the energy and run-time performance of WebAssembly and JavaScript on the Web. We used micro-benchmarks and also real applications in order to have more realistic results. Preliminary results show that WebAssembly, while still in its infancy, is starting to already outperform JavaScript, with much more room to grow. A statistical analysis indicates that WebAssembly produces significant performance differences compared to JavaScript. However, these differences differ between micro-benchmarks and real-world benchmarks. Our results also show that WebAssembly improved energy efficiency by 30%, on average, and showed how different WebAssembly behaviour is among three popular Web Browsers: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. Our findings indicate that WebAssembly is faster than JavaScript and even more energy-efficient. Additionally, our benchmarking framework is also available to allow further research and replication.