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160 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.409s | source
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a_wild_dandan ◴[] No.41899143[source]
I’m continually surprised at JavaScript’s speed. Seeing JS sometimes nipping at the heels of C/rust/etc in performance benchmarks blows me away. V8 is such an incredible piece of engineering.

In my work, it’s hard to justify using something other than JS/TS — incredible type system, fast, unified code base for server/mobile/web/desktop, world’s biggest package ecosystem for anything you need, biggest hiring pool from being the best known language, etc.

It’s just such a joy to work with, ime. Full-stack JS has been such a superpower for me, especially on smaller teams.

The dissonance between how the silent majority feels about JS (see, e.g the SO yearly survey), vs the animus it receives on platforms like HN is sad. So here’s my attempt at bringing a little positivity and appreciation to the comments haha.

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1. ivanjermakov ◴[] No.41901486[source]
I want more people to understand how much people are working on JS performance. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla - all have incentive to make it as fast as possible.

Too bad JS is not the best candidate for many optimizations.

I wonder if we'll get to the point of having a compiled version of JS that allows more static optimizations to be done.

WebAssembly might occupy that niche if it gets nice standardized runtime.

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2. andrewstuart ◴[] No.41902700[source]
You could try the quickJS compiler.

https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html#qjsc-compiler-1