Web Assembly is 10 years old, and one of its many use cases is improving the performance of web applications. WASM actually runs faster than JavaScript code in many cases, Thomas Steiner, who works in Google Developer Relations for Chrome, told me in November.

But that begs the question: How much faster?

Jessica Wachtel, a regular contributor to The New Stack, conducted a side-by-side test to see how much faster WebAssembly is than JavaScript for heavy data processing. She walks readers through how she performed the comparison, and her results are revealing: Wasm handily outperformed vanilla JavaScript on processing both light and heavy tasks.

What may surprise you, though, is how far Wasm left JavaScript behind on heavy processing tasks.

Other stories I’m loving today:

• Mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose technology is the most enshittified of all? The Repair Association has published its “Worst of CES” awards, and TNS regular contributor David Cassel shares who won a new award for the greatest “enshittification” of a technology.
• TNS writer and Linux aficionado Jack Wallen has been using Linux since 1997. He found a distribution that will remind you of Linux’s early days, but with all the modern bells and whistles.

Coming off a great holiday break, full of eggnog-induced reflection and an eagerness to get this year rolling, I couldn’t resist a quick (and slightly self-congratulatory) look back at my 2025 trend predictions. Let's see if I deserve a crystal ball or just a cheap plastic one. Here’s a lightning...

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