←back to thread

160 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.413s | source
Show context
austin-cheney ◴[] No.41902697[source]
The sentiment of the article is 90% right. In all fairness there are opportunities for making tools faster by writing them in faster languages, but these tend to be extreme scenarios like whether you really need to send 10 million WebSocket messages in the fastest burst possible. Aside from arithmetic operations JavaScript is now as fast as Java and only 2-4x slower than C++ for several years now and it compiles almost instantly.

Really though, my entire career has taught me to never ever talk about performance with other developers... especially JavaScript developers or other developers working on the web. Everybody seems to want performance but only within the most narrow confines of their comfort zone, otherwise cowardice is the giant in the room and everything goes off the rails.

The bottom line is that if you want to go faster then you need to step outside your comfort zone, and most developers are hostile to such. For example if you want to drive faster than 20 miles per hour you have to be willing to take some risks. You can easily drive 120 miles per hour, but even the mere mention of increased speed sends most people into anxiety apocalypse chaos.

The reactions about performance from other developers tend to be so absolutely over the top extreme that I switched careers. I just got tired of all the crying from such extremely insecure people who claim to want something when they clearly want something entirely different. You cannot reasonably claim to want to go faster and simultaneously expect an adult to hold your hand the entire way through it.

replies(3): >>41903042 #>>41904570 #>>41905040 #
1. ludovicianul ◴[] No.41904570[source]
Java is very fast: https://github.com/gunnarmorling/1brc
replies(1): >>41904754 #
2. austin-cheney ◴[] No.41904754[source]
So... about performance. Performance is the difference between two or more measures. When not compared against something everything is itself fast. Out of a list of 1 item that one item will always be the 100% fastest item in the list. So, what's really important is not whether something is fast, but whether that thing is faster than something else and by how much.

I suspect Java is fast. JavaScript is also fast. They are both fast. Without comparing measures the only significant distinction between the two is the time to compile. In that case Java is slow, or at least just substantially slower than JavaScript.

Fortunately there are comparative benchmarks: The Programming Benchmark Games. It is not always the best, but it is certainly better than naught.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...