A Snapshot of the Performance of Wasm Backends for Managed Languages

Explore the current state of WebAssembly performance for managed programming languages in this 24-minute conference presentation from MPLR 2025. Examine a comprehensive performance comparison between six managed language implementations (including Dart, Haskell, OCaml, Ruby, and Scheme) running on WebAssembly versus their native implementations. Discover how WebAssembly's extended features like garbage collection, references, exceptions, and tail calls facilitate compilation of managed languages, while analyzing the performance trade-offs involved. Learn about specific implementation choices through a detailed case study of the Bigloo Scheme compiler and understand how different compilation strategies impact performance on the WebAssembly platform. Gain insights into the current limitations and promising aspects of WebAssembly as a compilation target, including findings that show the best implementations averaging about 1.4× slower than native backends while some implementations experience significant slowdowns of over 8×. Understand the varying quality of WebAssembly implementations across different managed languages and their implications for future development in cross-platform compilation strategies.