I also have a WASM crypto library, focused on hashing algorithms: https://www.np...

chjj · on July 9, 2020

Yeah, hashing in WASM seems to be fine in terms of speed, though 60x faster does still sound surprising to me. Hashes with 32 bit words (e.g. sha256) can be optimized fairly well in javascript due to the SMI optimization in engines like v8. I should play around with hashing more.

I was in particular benchmarking ECC, which is much harder to optimize in JS (and in general).

Code is here:

JS: https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcrypto/tree/master/lib/js

C: https://github.com/bcoin-org/libtorsion

To benchmark:

    $ git clone https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcrypto
    $ cd bcrypto
    $ npm install
    $ node bench/ec.js -f 'secp256k1 verify' -B js

    $ git clone https://github.com/bcoin-org/libtorsion
    $ cd libtorsion
    $ cmake . && make
    $ ./torsion_bench
    $ make -f Makefile.wasi SDK=/path/to/wasi-sdk
    $ ./scripts/run-wasi.sh torsion_bench.wasm ecdsa

Shorel · on July 9, 2020

I think he doesn't complain at all about WASM speed vs JS.

He wants WASM to be closer to C performance. I.e. to move further along this line:

    |JS|========>|WASM|=========>=========>========>|C|