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Or better yet, WebGL should be able to do this in a few ms on a GPU.

Or simply use the canvas api, which has super optimized graphics libraries behind it - rather than reimplementing the wheel :)

But I get that really this was a how much can wasm help performance as % vs js - you could always write an “optimized” routine and compare those and theoretically achieve something similar.

The article mentions why they couldn't use canvas for this: they are running this code in a worker, and canvas support in workers is not great in browsers so far.

Ah my bad for skimming - I though most canvas stuff worked these days? (I recall many years ago when I worked on such things that fonts were the biggest problem, but also people generally wanting to be able to paint dom elements in their as well)

It is OffScreenCanvas, the variant that works in web workers, that has poor browser support.

Not only that, there's a nasty bug in Chrome that makes it unusable for our use-case https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=906619

In my experience, the canvas api is very slow and not well thought-out. For example, to create a native image object from raw pixels, you have to copy the pixels into an ImageData object, draw it to a canvas, create a data URL from the canvas and then load an image from that data URL.

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