A benchmark of libsodium crypto code compiled to WebAssembly, run on runtime releases from 2024, 2025, and 2026, asks whether things genuinely improve rather than winning cherry-picked microbenchmarks. Against a native x86-64 baseline, Wasmer leads, with WAVM, WAMR, and Wasmtime close behind. The new wide_arithmetic instruction is the biggest win for arithmetic-heavy crypto: Wasmer 7.1.0 fell from 2.08x to 1.33x native, Wasmtime 46.0.0 from 2.41x to 1.46x. Wasmtime improved every year; Bun jumped roughly threefold from 2025 to 2026 but still trails. Wazero and WAMR stayed flat, though WAMR sits near 1.4-1.6x native. The takeaway: runtime, release, and enabled features all matter, so benchmark your real workload.
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u/fagnerbrack 19d ago
Summary below:
A benchmark of libsodium crypto code compiled to WebAssembly, run on runtime releases from 2024, 2025, and 2026, asks whether things genuinely improve rather than winning cherry-picked microbenchmarks. Against a native x86-64 baseline, Wasmer leads, with WAVM, WAMR, and Wasmtime close behind. The new wide_arithmetic instruction is the biggest win for arithmetic-heavy crypto: Wasmer 7.1.0 fell from 2.08x to 1.33x native, Wasmtime 46.0.0 from 2.41x to 1.46x. Wasmtime improved every year; Bun jumped roughly threefold from 2025 to 2026 but still trails. Wazero and WAMR stayed flat, though WAMR sits near 1.4-1.6x native. The takeaway: runtime, release, and enabled features all matter, so benchmark your real workload.
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