This makes questions like “how fast is WebAssembly” a bit hard to answer. You don’t ask how fast algebraic notation is—it’s not a very sensible question. Taken in the context of something like JavaScript, the language is only as fast as the engine running it. JavaScript the language has no speed, but you can benchmark JS engines like V8, SpiderMonkey, and JavaScriptCore. You can benchmark the IO libraries of JS runtimes like Bun, Deno, and Node. What people actually mean is “how useful are the constructs of this language to efficient mappings of modern hardware” and “what is the current landscape of systems taking advantage of these constructs”.
6 Matching Annotations
- Jan 2026
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emnudge.dev emnudge.dev
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- Feb 2025
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www.science.org www.science.org
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Simply choosing a more efficient programming language speeds up this calculation
s/more efficient programming language/programming environments with more efficient implementations/
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- Oct 2022
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catgirl.ai catgirl.ai
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before that the support for parsing JSON in C was essential for using LSP servers
NB: the requirement wasn't actually "parsing JSON in C"; it's that for the JSON parsing the machine ultimately executes the same (or similar) instructions that it does when the JSON parsing is written in C and that C is compiled with GCC.
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- Aug 2022
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dercuano.github.io dercuano.github.io
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The idea here is to emulate the hardware platform WordPerfect ran on
That seems like unnecessarily tight coupling. Surely there's a better level of abstraction that's higher than "emulate the hardware platform".
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news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com
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I avoided using languages that I don't know how to bootstrap like node.js
There's a weird (read: "weirdly obvious") category error here. NodeJS is not a language. (This wouldn't be so notable if the comment didn't go on to say "The key point is writing to an interface and not an implementation.")
The puzzle piece that fits the shape of the hole here is "JS". JS is the language, NodeJS is one of its implementations—and chubot knew both of these things already, so it's odd that it was expressed this way. Plus, there's a lot more diversity of JS implementations than exist for e.g. Python...
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Typography in HTML is awful
A similar mistake is being made here as the one that precedes the reminder that there is no such thing as a fast programming language—only a given implementation can be called fast.
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