Benchmarking AssemblyScript for Faster Web Applications
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Abstract
As web applications are becoming increasingly complex, it is crucial now more than ever to be able to develop web apps with an emphasis on performance to ensure a responsive and smooth user experience. Since the introduction of Webassembly as a compilation target for the web, the promise of writing programs that can run at native speed seemed revolutionary in theory. But the real world performance benefits of Webassembly in comparison to Javascript is not clearly understood. This paper evaluates the current performance of Assemblyscript - a strict subset of TypeScript that compiles to Webassembly, and Javascript in the areas of numerical computing across multiple browsers. A set of benchmarks were developed in Assemblyscript that includes numerical computing problems from the Ostrich Benchmark suite. The tests were executed across Chrome and Firefox. After studying the results from the benchmarks that were created, we find that Assemblyscript demonstrates speedups that range between 1.1-7.2x. It is also noticed that writing idiomatic Typescript can slow down Assemblyscript in certain scenarios. In conclusion, this study suggests that Assemblyscript (and Webassembly) provides far more consistent and predictable performance in comparison to Javascript.