Comment by MartinMond

MartinMond Jul 5, 2018 parent

PSPDFKit CTO here: We've been using WebAssembly since 2017 to render PDF documents directly in the browser and strongly believe in the future of the technology.

We published this benchmark to have a public indicator of the performance gains WebAssembly promises in a real-world product.

mankash666 Jul 5, 2018

Hello Martin - slightly off topic. There's no pricing section on your website. Does one have to get in touch with sales for a quote?

MartinMond OP Jul 5, 2018

Yes, please contact our sales team to discuss your use case. We sell to indie developers, early startups up to large Fortune 100 companies with a wide range of use cases so we found custom pricing to be the best way for us to be able to sell our software to everyone and at the same time support our team size.

vanderZwan Jul 5, 2018

Hey, thanks for the interesting article, and the benchmark of course!

One bit of constructive feedback: add a date of publishing to the article. PSPDFKit already has multiple articles on WASM before, and it's nice to be able to tell which one is the most "up to date" at a glance.

SXX Jul 5, 2018

Any chance you also benchmarked WA version against native code? What are results in your case?

steipete Jul 5, 2018

We did that in https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2017/webassembly-a-new-hope/ - WebAssembly is really fast, the different is less than you'd expect.

jsheard Jul 5, 2018

It's still getting faster too, e.g. engines are starting to use trap-based bounds checking which greatly reduces overhead when running on 64-bit platforms.

nneonneo Jul 6, 2018

Could you elaborate on “trap-based bounds checking”, or provide a reference to learn more? My searching mostly pointed to “trap” as being a WASM concept, rather than some processor feature that improves bounds checks.

jules Jul 6, 2018

It means using the processor's memory protection features to prevent programs from reading memory that they're not supposed to read, rather than inserting check instructions at every memory access.

jsheard Jul 6, 2018

Yeah, the V8 devs go into detail here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17y4kxuHFrVxAiuCP_FFtFA2H...

They just recently shipped it on Linux with V8 v6.8, but the Windows implementation is still a work in progress.

jules Jul 6, 2018

Excellent post! Webassembly appears to be approximately half as fast as native. Do you know where that gap comes from, and how much of it can be expected to close?

Wurdan Jul 6, 2018

Hi there,

Thanks for publishing this benchmark, but I've got a question about the results. The description of the charts states that 'A lower score is better', and between the two charts you say 'when we compare WebAssembly with our JavaScript fallback ... all browsers except Firefox are still slower'. But WebAssembly has a lower score than JavaScript on all browser/OS combinations except Chrome67/macOS, Safari/macOS and Edge/Win10. Could you clarify which way the results are pointing?

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