#JIT

A project called WATaBoy demonstrates that JIT-compiling Game Boy CPU instructions to WebAssembly can achieve faster performance than native interpreters. This approach leverages the web browser's existing JIT infrastructure for WebAssembly. This is significant because it shows a novel way to overcome platform restrictions (e.g., iOS blocking JIT) by using WebAssembly as a portable, high-performance target. It could enable smoother emulation on constrained platforms and inspire similar approaches for other retro systems. The project notes that while native interpreters can have roughly 1000% overhead, WebAssembly JIT overhead is around 20%, making the JIT approach faster. However, Firefox was observed to be 25% slower than Chrome/Safari for this workload.