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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

(nolanlawson.com)
160 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jpalawaga ◴[20 Oct 24 21:53 UTC] No.41898791[source]▶
Anyone who has done a programming contest, advent of code, etc knows that the language doesn’t matter so much as your algorithm.

Yes, the language can bring a nice speed up, or might give you better control of allocations which can save a lot of time. But in many cases, simply picking the correct algorithm will deliver you most of the performance.

As someone who doesn’t JavaScript a lot, I’d definitely prefer a tool written in go and available on brew over something I need to invoke node and its environment for.

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1. Ferret7446 ◴[20 Oct 24 23:31 UTC] No.41899401[source]▶
Quite the opposite, for most cases you don't hit the scale where asymptotic algorithmic performance really makes a big impact (e.g., for many small set comparisons, iterating over a list is faster than a hash set, but only by 10-50% or so), vs switching to a compiled language which instantly gets you 10x to 100x performance basically for free.

Or perhaps another way to look at it, if you care enough about performance to choose a particular algorithm, you shouldn't be using a slow language in the first place unless you're forced to due to functional requirements.