WATaBoy reports JIT-to-WebAssembly beating a native interpreter

Category: Engineering post
Status: discussion
Sources: author write-up, discussion
Summary: Seth Humphries described WATaBoy, a Game Boy emulator that JIT-compiles Game Boy CPU instructions into WebAssembly bytecode at runtime, which the browser then compiles to native code. Emulating Pokemon Blue, it ran about 1.2x faster than the same interpreter running natively, which the author frames as evidence that JIT-to-Wasm is a viable strategy on platforms such as iOS that block traditional JIT.
Why it matters: It is a worked data point that generating WebAssembly can beat a native interpreter, relevant to emulation and to dynamic-language runtimes targeting Wasm.