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JS engines have improved by about 2 orders of magnitude in speed for actual use over the last 10 or so years. They've outpaced Moores law.
by kybernetikos 10y ago
JS engines have improved by about 2 orders of magnitude in speed for actual use over the last 10 or so years. They've outpaced Moores law.
- goatlover 10y agoProbably because the head guy working on V8 had lots of experience with virtual machines going back to Self in the 80s. But it's kind of silly to say that JS VMs have outpaced Moore's law, given that interpreted JS was very slow to begin with. It's not the same as a compiled languge improving by that much in the same time. Basically, JS wasn't leveraging much of the computer's power until V8 came along.
- kybernetikos 10y agoIt seems that you're complaining about some perceived meaning in my comment, but I'm not sure what it was. Having written significant pieces of code in javascript over the last 13 years, I've benefitted massively from those speed increases, and while I'm aware of a number of reasons that they have occurred (including but not limited to the v8 engine - I remember reading excitedly about tamarin, tracemonkey and the like), I don't think it's silly to point out the sheer magnitude of the improvement. I'm not trying to say that JS is going to save us from Wirth's law or anything, I'm just trying to give people context on what a huge jump it has been.