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Well remember, WebAssembly just a different representation format for the same instruction set, executed by the underlying virtual machine (v8, spidermonkey, etc). So you should expect to see much of a performance difference.

The main benefit of WebAssembly is so that we can write code using our favorite languages (not just javascript!) and compile to a common binary format the browser understands. The objectives of WebAssembly never had anything to do with performance.



> The main benefit of WebAssembly is so that we can write code using our favorite languages

JavaScript is already common format that browser understands and there are implementations for a lot of languages translating them to JavaScript. So WebAssembly definitely is about performance, because using other languages is already solved problem.


Are there DOM bindings for languages other than JavaScript or is WebAssembly only for backend/webservices?


As far as I understand you can call JS APIs from WebAssembly, which means you use the already available DOM APIs. I don't know exactly what the calling convention from WASM to JS looks like, but I guess it's specified somewhere.


There are a few, none of them optimal for DOM manipulation yet because they all involve calling javascript. There is plans to add wasm dom hooks eventually. https://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/conne...


WebAssembly is tied to asm.js, which is about performance.




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