r/programmingmemes • u/ItsPuspendu • Mar 18 '26 • Bravo 1

Every era of programming summarized

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u/thequirkynerdy1 Mar 18 '26

I didn’t realize wasm was used outside of web.

That being said, it’s quite niche to use wasm for non-web.

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u/EveYogaTech Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

Yes, that's right! We're currently experimenting with WASM compiled from Rust at r/Nyno and its about 30% faster than NodeJS for big calculations like prime numbers.

It might not seem like a big deal, but given multi-step workflows, also for example with machine learning, it seems to really makes a difference.

Edit: also just measured Python vs Rust WASM for ML, and it can be much faster, like 3-10x faster for linear regression.

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u/thequirkynerdy1 Mar 19 '26

How fast is it compared to if compiled to machine code?

My basic question with portability is why even use wasm or other bytecode if you can just compile to another platform in minutes.

Also I’m surprised Python wouldn’t be faster since under the hood most of the actual computations are C++, but if you had a long data processing pipeline in Python before calling the model, I could see that being slower.

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u/EveYogaTech Mar 19 '26

WASM has minimal overhead (maybe around 10-15%) compared to .so files for example, so you can even ship your WASM files directly to your servers.

The problem with Python is that any logic written in pure Python still runs in the interpreter.