Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture The Mill's Competition: Can it still win? Reply To: The Mill's Competition: Can it still win?

joseph.h.garvin
Participant
Post count: 22

WebAssembly is a fantastic development, it’s gaining steam because compared to JavaScript, it’s much faster, the performance is much more reliable (it’s easy to accidentally break the JavaScript JIT’s ability to optimize a particular chunk of code), there’s no GC so latency is better, and you can target it with statically typed languages like Rust, so correctness is often better as well. So compared to using JavaScript it’s amazing, and will continue to get better with WASI (WebAssembly on its own has no syscalls, WASI adds a posix like layer).

But it doesn’t negate any of the performance/power advantages of the Mill. A WebAssembly compiler targeting the Mill should still end in better performance per watt than a WebAssembly compiler targeting x86.

This thread is a bit like saying, “Is the Mill still relevant because the JVM let’s you write code once and have it run everywhere, as well as preventing all the common security issues like buffer overflows and out of bounds accesses?” Look at how that worked out.