A Study on the Performance of WebAssembly Versus JavaScript in an SVG Editor Environment

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based image format for two-dimensional diagrams. Made up of vectors, SVG enable image and behavior manipulation through a versatile XML-based format that can be created and edited with any text editor and many graphical editing software. With the advent of the web, SVG editing applications have become increasingly available to the public. However, in order to be able to serve users the ability to edit vector graphics in real-time, the performance of the editor plays a significant role in ensuring a smooth user experience. The goal of this study is in comparing the performance of WebAssembly and JavaScript for an SVG editor environment. Our results show that the WebAssembly implementation outperforms JavaScript in terms of execution time and memory usage.