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I am confused as to why this is noteworthy—their engine benchmarks as much slower than the competitors.

For startup performance Wasmi and Wasm3 are both the fastest engines according to the benchmarks. For execution performance you are right that generally JIT engines are expected to be faster than interpreter based Wasm engines.

Also, as stated in the article, on Apple silicon Wasmi currently performs kinda poorly but this will be improved in the future. On AMD server chips Wasmi is the fastest Wasm interpreter.

Thanks for the detail!

Do you have a good metric for where the break even point is? Some X-million instructions?

No I do not but it is a very interesting question and probably not even answerable in practice because not every instruction takes the same amount of time to execute to completion. An outlier in this regard are for example host function calls which could do arbitrary things on the host side or bulk-memory operations which scale linearly with their inputs etc.

There are a few benchmarks where Wasmi is the fastest interpreter, for example:

https://wasmi-labs.github.io/blog/posts/wasmi-v0.32/benches/...

I appreciate you pointing these out—thanks!

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