←back to thread

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
Show context
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.

replies(12): >>41898816 #>>41898879 #>>41898890 #>>41898952 #>>41899000 #>>41899028 #>>41899401 #>>41901158 #>>41901185 #>>41901525 #>>41902030 #>>41904514 #
tyree731 ◴[20 Oct 24 21:56 UTC] No.41898816[source]▶
Lots of very smart people have worked very hard on Python tools written in Python, yet the rust rewrites of those tools are so much faster. Sometimes it really is the programming language.
replies(6): >>41898834 #>>41898859 #>>41898913 #>>41898949 #>>41899003 #>>41899226 #
jampekka ◴[20 Oct 24 22:17 UTC] No.41898949[source]▶
Python is really really slow compared to JS though.
replies(3): >>41899001 #>>41899014 #>>41901003 #
kukkamario ◴[21 Oct 24 05:45 UTC] No.41901003{3}[source]▶
Node is so slow to start that python script can complete before Javascript even begins to execute.
replies(1): >>41902074 #
1. jampekka ◴[21 Oct 24 09:01 UTC] No.41902074{4}[source]▶
For extremely simple scripts maybe. I get around 70 ms difference in startup time.

  $ time python3 -c "print('Hello world')"
  Hello world

  real 0m0.017s

  $ time node -e "console.log('Hello world')"
  Hello world
  
  real 0m0.084s