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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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thomasvogelaar ◴[21 Oct 24 06:55 UTC] No.41901399[source]▶
I don't buy the argument that a lot of the performance jumps from rewrites comes from developers writing more optimised code.

I've worked on multiple rewrites of existing systems in both JS and PHP to Go and those projects were usually re-written strictly 1:1 (bugs becoming features and all that). It was pretty typical to see an 8-10x performance improvement by just switching language.

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xandrius ◴[21 Oct 24 07:20 UTC] No.41901538[source]▶
Exactly the same experience.

For a smallish batch processing script I had written in node, I just fed it to chatgpt and got the golang version. It went from being unusable with over 100K records to handling 1M on exactly the same machine.

And only then I started adding things like channels, parallelism, and smart things.

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1. thomasvogelaar ◴[21 Oct 24 07:31 UTC] No.41901594[source]▶
Now that there's no perfect parity to maintain we've started optimising the Go versions as well. Multiple 2x performance improvements once we started doing this, on top of the original performance improvements. This translates to insane cost savings when you're working at scale.