3 ms·

> Compiled languages are always faster. More like: there is such a thing as a "compiled language".

• sparkie 9y ago
  There's such thing as an uncompilable language, so in the universe of all programming languages, the set of compilable languages is the compliment. But the article isn't talking about that. It's referring to the canonical implementations used by each language, which is occasionally, but rarely, both compiled and non-compiled.
  • pygy_ 9y ago
    Do you have an example of a language that can be interpreted but not compiled (formally a language such that there exists a valid program that can be interpreted but not compiled into machine language)?
    • sparkie 9y ago
      Kernel cannot be reasonably compiled because compound operatives can depend entirely on user input data. For example, the presence of string->symbol means that a user could insert a custom operator into an environment at runtime then evaluate the expression to which it refers. There's now way to account for this at some theoretical 'compile time', unless you're JIT compiling after every external input, which I'm pretty sure is what we'd call interpretation.
      • pygy_ 9y ago
        So it can't be statically compiled, although it doesn't require an interpreter provided a full language compiler is part of the runtime of compiled programs whose input can update the code... Interesting... very meta :-)
• roryisok 9y ago
  That points to an article saying java is sometimes faster than c++. Maybe I'm just being dumb but isn't java compiled too?
  • b4lancesh33t 9y ago
    I think the author must have meant AOT compiled.
  • jghn 9y ago
    You see some people refer to Java as a compiled language because of its compilation to byte code You see other people point out that Java is not a compiled language as it’s only converted to byte code. This is one of the few tech pedantic debates where I’ve chosen to not pick sides