Smaller code size was the goal; and BEAM bytecode adds up quick, even compressed. For example, the BEAM files for _just_ Ecto come out to about 1.2M in an uncompressed tarball, but in a gzipped tarball at maximum compression is still 799K. In my experience, about the smallest release for the average application in terms of BEAM bytecode is about 30M (uncompressed), across the standard library, dependencies, and your own code. Virtually none of that can be dead code eliminated, because the BEAM has to treat it all as potentially reachable. Shipping that much to a browser (even compressed) is just not viable.

Your point about instructions remaining hot in the cache might very well be true more often than not, but is highly sensitive to the application in question. The core interpreter opcode impls might all fit in cache at the same time (though I doubt even that with the BEAM due to how many there are), but any call to BIFs/NIFs is likely to cause evictions. It still might do better than natively-compiled code overall in that specific sense, but I would be hesitant to state any generalities about it when considered as a whole with all of the many other factors that play in to overall performance.

In any case, Firefly wasn't about building a faster BEAM, but about bringing BEAM languages to the browser (or really any Wasm host). While targeting standard server/desktop architectures was something we also wanted to support, particularly for writing CLI tools and such, we expect the BEAM will always be the first choice for people deploying to those systems. If we can build something that is faster than the BEAM in some cases due to the tradeoffs we make, that's great, but it isn't an explicit goal.