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0 pointstambourine_man6y ago0 comments

After JavaScript’s success, I’m convinced any language can be made fast given enough time and money.

Some languages are easier to be made faster, but I think JS almost proves there’s no such thing as a language incompatible with high performance by design.

You’d be hard pressed to conceive a more dynamic language and here we are, with crazy fast performance through many JIT tiers, interpreters, compilers, each of which would take years for a bright engineer to understand.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

chrisseaton6y ago· 2 in thread

JavaScript is an extremely small, well-defined language with relatively simple semantics and very limited metaprogramming. It’s not a challenge compared to something like Ruby.

iLemming6y ago

When was the last time you looked at it? Javascript is not small anymore. ECMAScript specification is over 800 pages, only a few hundred pages smaller than Java's.

chrisseaton6y ago

> When was the last time you looked at it?

I’ve read the latest version of the specs of all these languages in detail.

I’ve worked professionally on a team implementing Ruby, the latest version of JavaScript, and Java at the same time, using the same language implementation system, so I can directly compare.

JavaScript is simplest by far. There’s quite a lot of sugar now, but the core semantics are small and simple. The core semantics of a language like Ruby are an order of magnitude more complicated.

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