... I don't share your sentiment at all. I find this relevant to the subject matter as he is, albeit indirectly, mentioning the performance of WASM. I would be surprised if you got the same performance using just plain old js on the hardware he is referencing.
The JS/WASM may be limited to 60FPS if it is being forced to draw every frame, in which case it has to wait for the browser, it may be much faster.
CA are great fun to optimise, i've found ways to make them very fast in JS alone, by using pure state machine method with TypedArrays and sliding window algorithm. When letting it skip frames (only drawing when a frame is available) it can go far beyond generations per second... when you get to larger grids the ultimate optimisation is to use FFT, but on smaller ones there is too much overhead and sliding window is way faster.
Algorithmic optimisation is always better, but this demo works for the purpose of showing basic WASM compilation which was the authors intent, there may be an order of magnitude improvement if a different implementation was used.
I'm not sure that you could load JS on the BBC Micro!
The point as that for something running safely virtualised (and standardised) in a random browser and on a much larger canvas, the WASM implementation is very impressive.
