This is a spin-off discussion from ethereumjs/ethereumjs-util#195 which aims to assess whether it makes sense to use Wasm modules for crypto.

The arguments for this approach being that WebAssembly is now available everywhere (node & browsers) in comparison to node-gyp bindings (used by the keccak and secp256k1) which is (as the name suggests) only available in node (in browser a native JS code is executed).

What remains to be seen is how the performance of an efficient Wasm module compares against the node-gyp bindings and native JS code.