SMRTR ProgrammingJan 8, 2026Dev.to

I Tried to Beat WebAssembly With Node.js

SMRTR summary

A developer tests whether optimized Node.js can outperform WebAssembly by simulating 125,000 particles. Starting with basic JavaScript objects (3× slower than Wasm), they applied data-oriented design with typed arrays and linear memory layout, then added multi-threading with SharedArrayBuffer. The final optimized Node.js version ran 1.26× faster than Wasm, demonstrating that aggressive optimization techniques can make high-level languages competitive with low-level alternatives.

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