I used to believe that javascript was slow, C was fast and that there was no way to change this because of the way that javascript is interpreted and not compiled. But the more I've learnt about the benefits of "on the fly" / "just in time" optimising compilers, the more I'm convinced this is the future of computing. Being able to use multiple threads and hence multiple cores simultaneously to optimise what is actual…
The difference in speed has a lot more to do with memory layout. Javascript will never be as fast for this reason. You could make a JIT language as fast as C so long as it supported value types properly. Most programs in the "slow" languages spend most of their time chasing pointers around.
I used to believe that javascript was slow, C was fast and that there was no way to change this because of the way that javascript is interpreted and not compiled. But the more I've learnt about the benefits of "on the fly" / "just in time" optimising compilers, the more I'm convinced this is the future of computing. Being able to use multiple threads and hence multiple cores simultaneously to optimise what is actual…
What's funny to me is how JavaScript has gone from something of a joke to a very well regarded, performant, and heavily used programming language. I can clearly remember the days when proposing any significant programming in JavaScript would get a developer laughed out of the room. Is there another example of a language that has had such a 180 degree turn around in respect and popularity?
JS had the advantage of being the default language of the web current younger generation of programmers grew up with, and then tons of resources were thrown at it.
I'm sure Python, Ruby and PHP would benefit just as much from such attention, although I guess Python has had that in scientific computing, and PHP with recent 7 version and FB.
Reports of some jitted Java code running faster than C (after warmup) are old. I remember seeing those claims for some super hot VM in the old IBM System's journal from 2000, and yes, IIRC that was a VM written mostly in Java. However, those isolated examples rarely if ever translated to high performance in real-world projects. The same issue has an experience report of the travails of IBM's San Francisco project. Pe…
Heh ... one of my employees took it into their head to code up some arithmetic algorithms in C++ a month or so ago. We do not use C++ for anything, we are all Python and JVM based. But he decided that he was going to achieve an amazing win by optimising some numerical code to get order of magnitude benefits, and without asking invested 4 hours into coding it up. I wrote a naive implementation of the same thing in Gro…
The difference in speed has a lot more to do with memory layout. Javascript will never be as fast for this reason. You could make a JIT language as fast as C so long as it supported value types properly. Most programs in the "slow" languages spend most of their time chasing pointers around.
Julia comes fairly close.
And Julia's tuples, named tuples, and structs are value-types without pointers.
What's funny to me is how JavaScript has gone from something of a joke to a very well regarded, performant, and heavily used programming language. I can clearly remember the days when proposing any significant programming in JavaScript would get a developer laughed out of the room. Is there another example of a language that has had such a 180 degree turn around in respect and popularity?
> respect Not much respect, but more acceptance as a unavoidable language to use that thanks of millons of $$$$/human-hours of effort to polish it... is ok-ish.
I'd say it's no worse than Ruby or Python. Async-everything is what makes it better, imo. No need for Twisted/EventMachine fragmentation.
This is how people end up using it on the back-end when they do have a choice.
Though "respect" is a corny word to use for any language. I don't respect my screwdriver either.
Heh ... one of my employees took it into their head to code up some arithmetic algorithms in C++ a month or so ago. We do not use C++ for anything, we are all Python and JVM based. But he decided that he was going to achieve an amazing win by optimising some numerical code to get order of magnitude benefits, and without asking invested 4 hours into coding it up. I wrote a naive implementation of the same thing in Gro…
In my experience, writing java (or groovy here) in c++ results in horribly slow code which the jvm runs circles around, and it sounds like that's the problem your employee ran into. > But for all the applications where the high performance code is in niches at the edge and there simply aren't resources or expertise to fully tune the native implementation It's interesting you say this, because in my experience it's th…
In addition, a lot of the techniques used to write high-performance Java boil down to "write it like C". Avoid interfaces, avoid polymorphic virtual calls (as you can't avoid virtuals entirely), avoid complex object graphs, avoid allocating as much as possible...it's not nearly as nice as naive Java. Still nicer than C IMO. If your process segfaults you can know for certain that it's a platform bug.
Just use Express.js or Sails.js, they're 1:1 to Sinatra or Rails. Join us!
Unfortunately Sails is nowhere near as good as Rails. Which is kind of strange given the size of the JavaScript community, and the fact that PHP has Laravel and Python has Django, both of which are comparable to Rails. Amusingly given all the PHP hate, if you want a faster rails-like framework, Laravel might be your best bet.
I don't know anything about Laravel but I've been working with Rails since 2006 and with Django since 2016. Django has little to do with Rails. It's much more similar to Java Struts from 2005 (when I left it for Rails), form objects and template tags among the other nuisances. No XML thanks god, but a weak deployment story (no Capistrano or Mina, I built my own tool). I'd pick Django over Struts without thinking (I don't do Java anymore, even with morr modern frameworks), but I pick Rails over Django any time customers give me the choice. Django (and Struts) are optimized for large projects at the cost of developer time but very few projects grow even to medium sized. Django has a decent admin tool. That's the only advantage I can think it has over Rails for the typical project I do.
I also worked with Phoenix (Elixir) in the last 12 months. It's kind of midway between Rails and Django in terms of framework and language complexity.
I used to believe that javascript was slow, C was fast and that there was no way to change this because of the way that javascript is interpreted and not compiled. But the more I've learnt about the benefits of "on the fly" / "just in time" optimising compilers, the more I'm convinced this is the future of computing. Being able to use multiple threads and hence multiple cores simultaneously to optimise what is actual…
I used to be a Smalltalk developer on Windows 3.1 for a brief time in the early 90's. When I found out that internally, Smalltalk was compiled into a sort of intermediate assembly language, and run on a virtual machine, I wondered why couldn't we just distribute the assembly language part over the Internet, where it could be run on any kind of machine with an interepreter. Everyone told me I was crazy, it was impract…