When talking about
tooling: around five years ago, I introduced parallelism to a Node.js-based build system, in a section that was embarrassingly parallel. It was
really painful to implement, made it noticeably harder to maintain, and my vague memory is that on an 4-core/8-thread machine I only got something like a 3–4× speedup. I think workers are mature enough now that it wouldn’t be
quite so bad, but it would still be fairly painful.
In Rust, I’d have added Rayon as a dependency to my Cargo.toml, inserted `use rayon::prelude::;` (or a more specific import, if I preferred) into my file, changed one `.iter()` to `.par_iter()`, and voilà, it’d have compiled (all the types would have satisfied Send) and given probably at least a 6–7× speedup.
Seriously, when you get to talking about a lot of performance tricks and such (I’m thinking things like the bit maps referred to at the end), even when they’re possible* in JavaScript, they’re frequently—I suspect even normally—way easier to implement in Rust.