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I really like your comment, thanks. I suppose the question that many people would like to ask, but it's hard to test is: "Can we rank the speed of languages,

by grecy 8y ago

I really like your comment, thanks. I suppose the question that many people would like to ask, but it's hard to test is: "Can we rank the speed of languages, given each are used by a domain expert to take full advantage of the features of that language" or some such. i.e. if a masterful C programmer and a masterful C++ programmer and a masterful Java Programmer and a masterful Ruby programmer all write something, which is faster. I'm sure the answer is "it depends", because that's always the answer.

jungler 8y ago
For that particular question: They would all be the same speed because the optimization requirement would lead each one to write a compiler in their language of choice that emits a perfectly tuned assembly binary. What gets overlooked in language performance is that you pick a language for what are, in essence, placeholder constructs. The performance matters only in that you need it to be fast enough "off the shelf" that you don't have to start writing a compiler. But you generally aren't prevented from using that approach to boost your existing code, and high performance systems often converge on that strategy in some degree, because it lets you keep maintainable source code and add toggles for debugging and optimization that you won't get from treating the application and compiler code as separate entities.