Not joking, not trolling, thought it was widely known that JavaScript is generally significantly faster than Python. Haven't had this debate in 15 years, but let me explain:
> What data structures?
Everything in JavaScript is an object, even Arrays. So even an Array lookup is O(1) in JavaScript - not true in Python where it has to search the Array. Only if you created key/val pairs in Python (via list/hash) could you exploit the O(1) lookup for accessing data, but I can't use Python list for a large model like an LLM without hitting memory errors (see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5537618/memory-errors-an...)
> Python is run-time
Both languages are dynamic (not compiled) lol, what are you trying to say here? The point is that the number of steps it takes to go from high-level dynamic code (scripts) to machine-readable instructions is 1 step in JS, but 2 steps in Python, that's literally why it's slower to RUN than JavaScript. Literally runs slower as in number of executions.
> Multi-process is an OS feature that has nothing to do with JS or Python
Not true in the slightest. It's a language feature. I'll use my favorite word of the day and say it's an "exploit" more than a feature, when you can run what would be blocking IO in parallel. Python on the other hand is "single flow" executing statements one-at-a-time.
What a toxic comment, I said thanks to everyone else but not you. I retract my thank you! I hope you learned something today at least. This made me LOL: "JS uses some heuristics to decide whether to use a hashmap or to make the object as a static struct" neither hashmap nor struct exists in JS, just funny. There's ES6 Map, but that is really just an Object, not the other way around lol
> Everything in JavaScript is an object, even Arrays. So even an Array lookup is O(1) in JavaScript - not true in Python where it has to search the Array.
Huh? Array and list lookups are O(1) in Python too. Who told you that? Searching is different, and it's O(n) in both JS and Python. Can you really believe two mainstream programming languages can have such a drastic difference in time complexity?
Also, not my comment, but:
> JS uses some heuristics to decide whether to use a hashmap or to make the object as a static struct" neither hashmap nor struct exists in JS, just funny.
I'm pretty sure they meant that Javascript internally uses either a hashmap or a struct (you can do something close in Python using __slots__) to represent an object. Those are standard data structure names, even though Javascript doesn't use the same terminology. Python doesn't call them hashmaps either.
My bad it's on the insertion side, you can O(1) insert into the middle of Array-likes like Set in JS (which I use in this lib), where I think Python is O(n) for all it's Array-likes. Think you can O(1) append to an Array though.
But there are at least a few other reasons Python is generally slower than JavaScript. It's popular in ML because it was popular in math, and it was popular in math because it's easy to teach in schools. People use Python for its ML libraries, and now its ML communities, not because it's a fast language - it isn't really. And has no browser implementation, so there are a few reasons I didn't choose Python.
Reading it again I think I understand what the other poster meant now, but they also said "multi-process has nothing to do with the language" when it does have a lot to do with scaling Node especially to handle concurrency. I did a little demo here a while ago to show what I mean, check out the browser tab example: https://github.com/bennyschmidt/simple-node-multiprocess
Thanks for your comments, I hate language vs language debates! :D
> you can O(1) insert into the middle of Array-likes like Set in JS
Sets are supposed to retain the insertion order. I don't think you can insert into the middle, let alone in O(1) time (as they are hashmaps, not linked lists).
> I hate language vs language debates!
I wasn't trying to compare JS to Python. My aim was to clarify a misunderstanding re: data structures used.
In the case of `Set` and `Map` they're keys though. It's sorted in that you can reference `data[1]` and get that element, but I don't know the keys are necessarily sorted.
This guy says "V8 team explains how some memory optimization was done on its hashtable implementation for Map, Set, WeakSet, and WeakMap: Optimizing hash tables: hiding the hash code
Based on 1 and 2: V8's Set and Map's get & set & add & has time complexity practically is O(1)."
I wouldn't bother arguing with this guy, he deliberately misquoted me on every point to make it seem like what he's saying is correct
Indeed I was talking about the internals of v8, and even linked a blog post explaining it, v8 is written in c++ so it doesn't use javascript data structures anyway.
Haha dude you think Python is fast, and said multi-process has nothing to do with JavaScript, so of course I'm going to write off anything you think at this point because you know nothing about dynamic languages.
I missed the V8 bit because I was replying to a lot of people - your overall point is still terrible because JavaScript is a lot faster than Python. Think about the larger point you're making.
Btw sometimes you say "it's just an OS feature" when convenient but you don't say "it's just an interpreter feature" (regarding V8) - I wonder at what point in the debate that will come out. That's why I hate these kinds of debates, they're all signaling and changing subjects and losing sight of the point being made.
Whenever I'm talking about time complexity, I'm in a terrible conversation that I can't wait to get out of. The bottom line is everybody in the world except you knows Python is slow as hell, and for more than 1 reason.
> What data structures?
Everything in JavaScript is an object, even Arrays. So even an Array lookup is O(1) in JavaScript - not true in Python where it has to search the Array. Only if you created key/val pairs in Python (via list/hash) could you exploit the O(1) lookup for accessing data, but I can't use Python list for a large model like an LLM without hitting memory errors (see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5537618/memory-errors-an...)
> Python is run-time
Both languages are dynamic (not compiled) lol, what are you trying to say here? The point is that the number of steps it takes to go from high-level dynamic code (scripts) to machine-readable instructions is 1 step in JS, but 2 steps in Python, that's literally why it's slower to RUN than JavaScript. Literally runs slower as in number of executions.
> Multi-process is an OS feature that has nothing to do with JS or Python
Not true in the slightest. It's a language feature. I'll use my favorite word of the day and say it's an "exploit" more than a feature, when you can run what would be blocking IO in parallel. Python on the other hand is "single flow" executing statements one-at-a-time.
What a toxic comment, I said thanks to everyone else but not you. I retract my thank you! I hope you learned something today at least. This made me LOL: "JS uses some heuristics to decide whether to use a hashmap or to make the object as a static struct" neither hashmap nor struct exists in JS, just funny. There's ES6 Map, but that is really just an Object, not the other way around lol