I thought I had read something in the past ~6 months implying that performance gap had become less of an issue, but I'd have to dig for a bit to find it. I understand that I should always expect crossing the WASM boundary to be slow.

I'm basically trying to build something that's like a colony sim meets idleRPG. You define a strategy once per day, submit it, and the colony sim chews on the instructions and plays forward. The user can just observe and devise a plan for adjusting their strategy the next day. I think this makes it an especially good candidate for WASM as I can simulate hundreds of semi-intelligent entities and don't ask for responsive user input.

I think there's also benefits with garbage collecting, right? I can avoid GC entirely with WASM but would inherently be subject to it with JS which then pushes me into a more imperative/mutable style of coding in an effort to preserve object lifetimes. I'd really rather stick to a declarative style if I can get away with the performance.