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> JavaScript will mop up most CLI apps in performance, including python and ruby, and will get close in perf to C if written carefully.

asm.js is what you mean?

If you so, you are not better to handwriting an assembly yourself.

I am kind of an involuntary webdev from time to time, and I am often the one invited to fix consequences of coding under influence, like a decision to write a GPS server with 100k+ packets per second load in Javascript.

People claiming that JS can be made be as fast as C have no idea at all what they say. Even Java with hand-jacked VM is easier to scale for such load than a JS server reduced to 1k lines of vanilla JS, using all and every performance trick Nodejs provides.




No I don't mean asm.js. You can write vanilla JS that avoids memory allocation beyond initialization as well as garbage collection, and runs certain algorithms faster than typical C due to differences such as JIT optimizations or the lack of a sentinel to terminate strings, etc.

My point was never to say that JS is in general as fast as C, only that a careful dev that is familiar with the VM's operation can get close for some tasks.




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