Browser performance comparison

[RichardRussell]

I've compared the speed of various different browsers running the Emscripten / Web Assembly edition of BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0, using the average of the times reported by the supplied timing.bbc example program as a metric (which means it is measuring only raw computational speed, the speed of graphics or input-output of any kind isn't assessed):

• Brave: 543 ns
• Chrome: 542 ns
• Edge: 532 ns
• Firefox: 462 ns
• Opera: 555 ns
• Vivaldi: 543 ns

and for reference:

• Native code (x86, 32-bit): 152 ns

I conclude that Web Assembly is at best about 3 times slower than native machine code, and that Firefox (as we already knew) is significantly faster than the other browsers.

This is not an invitation to report results from other platforms or other BBC BASIC implementations.