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160 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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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.

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1. chubot ◴[] No.41905040[source]
It's maybe 90% right in general, but it's 10% right (90% wrong) for the workload of language processors in particular. Lots of tiny objects are terrible workloads for JavaScript and Python.

Related comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35045520

Direct comparison I did between Python and C++ semantics - Oil's Parser is 160x to 200x Faster Than It Was 2 Years Ago - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/parser-benchmarks.html

This is the same realistic program in both Python and C++ -- no amount of "optimizing Python" is going to get you C++ speed.

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FWIW I agree with you about the debates -- many people can't seem to hold 2 ideas in their head at once.

Like that C++ unordered_map is atrociously slow, but C++ is a great language for writing hash tables.

And that Python was faster than Go for hash table based workloads when Go first came out, but also Python is slow for AST workloads.

Performance is extremely multi-dimensional, and nuanced, but especially with programming languages people often want to summarize/compress that info in inaccurate ways.