Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

> a rewrite is often faster just because it’s a rewrite – you know more the second time around

I think people often overlook this factor when doing rewrites and making big claims about the results.

Chances are if you’d done the rewrite in the same language you’d get similar results.

I don’t know if it’d be possible to empirically prove that. I’ve only seen it happen a few times.

It’s like saying you’ll rewrite Romeo and Juliet because you already know they die at the end. It’s a little more nuanced than that!

Yes, I agree it is nuanced.

I have a particular stereotypical programmer in mind. The one that rewrites their entire program in X, because it's fast. Not because they understand the data dependencies and run-time performance characteristics of their program.

Typically these folks misattribute the performance gains they experience in such projects to the language itself rather than the tacit knowledge they have of the original program.

At the end of the day switching from an interpreted language to a natively compiled language will result in a faster program. Of course there are performance gains to be had refactoring with a deeper understanding of the problem. That might be enough in many cases, but if the primary goal is speed the language cannot be ruled out.