~ pffft.wasm: an FFT library for the web

PFFFT is a small, pretty fast FFT library programmed in C with a BSD-like license. I have taken it upon myself to compile a WebAssembly version of PFFFT to make it available for browsers and node.js environments. It is called pffft.wasm and available on GitHub.

The pffft.wasm library comes in two flavours. One is compiled with SIMD instructions while the other comes without these instructions. SIMD stands for ‘single instruction, multiple data’ and does what it advertises: in a single step it processes multiple datapoints. The aim of SIMD is to make calculations several times faster. Especially for workloads where the same calculations are repeated over and over again on similar data, SIMD optimisation is relevant. FFT calculation is such a workload.

Evidently the SIMD version is much faster but there is no need to take my word for it. Below you can benchmark the SIMD version of pffft.wasm and compare it with the non-SIMD version on your machine. A pure Javascript FFT library called FFT.js serves as a baseline.

When running the same benchmark on Firefox and on Chrome it becomes clear that FFT.js on Chrome is about twice as fast thanks to its superior Javascript engine for this workload. The performance of the WebAssembly versions in Chrome and Firefox is nearly identical. Safari unfortunately does not (yet) support SIMD WebAssembly binaries and fails to complete the benchmark.

The source code, the limitations and other info can be found at the pffft.wasm GitHub repository

Edit: PulseFFT might be of interest as well: a (as far as I can tell non-SIMD) WASM version of KissFFT.

Code and UGent