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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

I am wondering, would it be possible to do this even faster with WebAssembly? So that it is supported by all major browsers?

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At a quick glance, I see mostly primitive operations on pre-allocated chunks of memory. WebAssembly might give you a slight performance improvement, but I doubt it would be drastic. V8 is pretty good at optimizing this kind of code. I’m sure the other browser vendors can do this pretty well too.

You're right! In my experience, today JavaScript is so fast on careful code like this that even ports to C++ or Rust aren't much faster, and any gains would likely be offset by JS <-> WebAssembly communication overhead (although this is being rapidly improved).

Here's a good thread with benchmarks that compare Earcut (also one of my libraries) to C++ and AssemblyScript WebAssembly ports: https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/4835 (in short, mostly slower than JS)

Another anecdotal example is that C++ and Rust ports of https://github.com/mapbox/delaunator (my Delaunay triangulation library) are only 10-15% faster.

Hopefully when SIMD lands, WebAssembly purely for performance improvement will be a viable strategy!

Do you have to consider a lot of Jascript- or even engine-specific quirks to write fast code like this, or is it mostly about paying attention to more general principles?

My impression is that JS engines can handle straightforward imperative code on typed arrays very well. But is there more stuff that I should pay attention to when writing performance-sensitive code that acts on large datasets in JS?

The most critical thing is avoiding unnecessary work — that usually means estimating algorithmic complexity and trying to reduce it where possible (e.g. by sorting + binary search, caching, using basic data structures like a priority queue, etc.). I'm meaning to make a long blog post about my approach to algorithms, but meanwhile you can check out my recent slide deck on the matter:

https://speakerdeck.com/mourner/fast-by-default-everyday-alg...

Is this supposed to have audio?

No, just slides — I don't have a video of the talk. Perhaps there will be one someday if I'm invited to some international JS conference :)

One other datapoint - I ported flatbush to C++, and I got a 2.6x speedup on the "Insert 1 million boxes" benchmark. C++ port is at https://github.com/IMQS/flatbush

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