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Tail calls are super important for non-C like control flow, and it's great that it might be added.

But what I really think wasm should focus on is to get near native performance (say, <50% overhead). Until that happens, the whole endeavor seems pointless to me.



Estimates vary (because benchmarks and use cases vary), but it's generally faster than 50%. That number was seen here,

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc19-jangda.pdf

(I assume that's what you refer to?) It's a good measurement, but it's from 2019, and it's just on 2 wasm engines. There are other estimates, like here:

https://kripken.github.io/blog/wasm/2020/07/27/wasmboxc.html

That tries to measure the fundamental overhead of wasm's sandboxing as opposed to a specific wasm VM, and it finds just 14%.


That seems very promising. If it really is that good, wasm has a lot more potential in my eyes.

But e.g. sharp/vips ended up with a much worse result: https://www.libvips.org/2020/09/01/libvips-for-webassembly.h...

It may just be a matter of waiting for simd and threads though.




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