I was talking with a colleague today who mentioned that he had looked at WASM for a particular use-case (file-verification IIRC) and had concluded that for now the overhead of copying memory made it run worse than well-written JavaScript. It is also my experience that the overhead of memory copying can really put a damper on performance improvements.
Now, I get that sharing memory is a huge safety issue - it kind of inherently breaks the sandbox, but when I see the "nanoprocesses" bit in the article I worry about death by a thousand paper cuts (lots of tiny WASM module spending more time copying data than processing it). Are there ways/plans to minimize memory copies that don't conflict with the safety concerns?
Now, I get that sharing memory is a huge safety issue - it kind of inherently breaks the sandbox, but when I see the "nanoprocesses" bit in the article I worry about death by a thousand paper cuts (lots of tiny WASM module spending more time copying data than processing it). Are there ways/plans to minimize memory copies that don't conflict with the safety concerns?