Working WASM build of parcnet-pod #37
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This is an experiment, shared for visibility. Not sure if we want to merge this or not.
I wanted to figure out:
a) how hard is it to get a working Wasm build of a Rust crate
b) what is the difference in performance between Rust/Wasm code and JS code for a small but non-trivial task (in this case, signing a POD1)
The answer to (a) is "not very difficult but there are some weird issues that require some knowledge to fix".
The answer to (b) is that the Wasm performance is notably worse than the JS performance.
Signing a POD1 using the
@pcd/podpackage takes just under 50ms on my Macbook Air M1, and requires around 100KiB of JavaScript dependencies.Signing a POD1 using
parcnet-podin Wasm takes around 250-280ms on my Macbook Air M1, and requires around 1.6MiB of Wasm to do so. This is quite a lot worse than I expected.Since
parcnet-podhas benchmark tests in Rust, I also tried those, which show that even in natively-compiled Rust, a small POD1 takes 80ms to sign. I am not sure why this is slower than it is in JavaScript.Perhaps the lesson to take from this is that our JavaScript toolchain is a bit more highly-evolved, depending on packages which have already been optimized for both performance and size, whereas our Rust code has not, and our Wasm toolchain is non-existent until now. Hopefully this means that there is low-hanging fruit for speed and size improvement.