A comparative analysis between Lua interpreter variants compiled to WASM, JavaScript and native

Abstract

Web technologies are essential players today. Being available in an almost ubiquitous way and well-standardized, they now can provide a reliable way to run different applications on different platforms without a significant discrepancy in their execution. In recent years, several developments now allow the execution of programs not initially designed for Web on standardized internet browsers. WebAssembly and JavaScript are well-known ways to achieve this result. C/C++ programs are known to be fast and light, but how well can WebAssembly and JavaScript perform with this kind of application compared to Native execution? This paper will answer this question for a specific Lua interpreter implementation commonly used on digital television platforms. And thus, it should be available on many different platforms, from Set-Top-Boxes to Smartphones from many manufacturers. We expect to provide valuable insights to anyone considering migrating a C/C++ code to WebAssembly or JavaScript and the pros and cons of this approach over developing natively for the platform.