Comments by "Winnetou17" (@Winnetou17) on "Rust is not a faster horse" video.
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Whoa, I mostly agree with the message of the video, but you REALLY need to be more careful on getting the information right.
First, Go being a better C++ is... questionable. But there have been other comments and is not exactly my area so I'll just leave it at that.
But later, "Java and Javascript are 3-4 times slower". Jeez. Holy crap! Java is like an order of magnitude faster than Javascript. You absolutely cannot put them in the same category. Javascript is interpreted, hence why it's slower. It's on the same page as Python and PHP. You don't create executables in Javascript, you need to run it through a runtime. Not to mention that, like PHP (don't know about Python) it basically single threaded. While Java is up there with the most performant languages if you know what you're doing and if the workload isn't prone to suffer from having Garbage Collection. I remember seeing that on ARM, some highly optimized program was 4% faster in Java than C (which also had a highly optimized version). I forgot the site with the benchmarks name though.
Really, this is such a basic and fundamental difference that I really cannot trust anything else you say now about Java nor Javascript. It's almost like comparing C++ with Python. No, just no.
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@NoBoilerplate But Java had trillions of dollars of optimisations too! That's why I was shocked. If I'm not mistaken Java has about the most advanced (and complex) garbage collection algorithms. And I know the JDK is quite a beast. And I say that as someone who doesn't like Java (and I like javascript, though I kind of hate about all frameworks on it).
Of course, there's no ceiling in optimisations. Unless you don't have enough data. And Javascript (unlike Typescript) does lack having strong typing everywhere for example. That by itself includes some run overhead. I guess it's a matter of things like Python having those ML libraries that are basically implemented in C and calling them in Python gives you basically the same speed (for those specific functions). Also like the Falcon framework/module in PHP is basically a collection of C functions presented in PHP which, if you only use them, you're close to C speed. But in both cases, you're restricted to a set of functions. And the language itself, being dynamic, has an overhead of its own.
I think that the benchmarks in which JS runs well are just that - cases where the engine already has an optimized solution implemented. Though if these cases are in good enough number, especially for the domain where JS is used, that's good and I think they can be used as representative of the language. But in general I'd go by worst case.
I guess I'll just have to up my game on current language speeds. I did a quick search now and I can't say I'm happy with the first page of google's results. To be fair, I did find in there some instances where JS is faster or on the same plane (to say so) with Java. But I'm still not convinced. To be frank, I really don't see something like Elasticsearch being implemented and running as well on Javascript.
While on this topic, do you have any good benchmarks sites ?
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