3 ms·

Repeatedly concatting a string is the fastest way I am aware of to build a longer one in Javascript. (This has been deliberately optimized for) I believe PHP th

Repeatedly concatting a string is the fastest way I am aware of to build a longer one in Javascript. (This has been deliberately optimized for) I believe PHP this might also be the case for, or at least very fast. Perl might be pretty fast at this but I could be wrong.

WorldMaker 5y ago
I know JS's case somewhat well and the lesson there is not the comment such as above that "it just does the right thing". JS doesn't use a "String Builder" under the hood with a lot of string + calls, but instead that JS does subtly the "wrong" thing as an optimization: in the .NET CLR strings are always, always immutable (or they are not strings according to guarantees that the CLR makes). JS lives in a single language VM that makes no such guarantees, and often lives in strictly single threaded worlds where the VM doesn't have to guarantee the immutability of strings to anyone at the binary memory layout level, so most JS VMs are free to do the "wrong thing" (from the .NET CLR perspective) and just mutably alter strings under the hood as a deliberate optimization. There's a lot of interesting conflations of "right" versus "wrong" in this this thread. There's the C# "best practices" "right" versus "wrong" of knowing when to choose things like StringBuilder over string.Concat or string's + operator overloading (which does just call string.Concat under the hood). There's the "does that right/wrong" apply to other languages question? (The answer is far more complex than just "right" and "wrong".) There's the VM guarantees of .NET CLR's hard line "no string is mutable" setting a somewhat hard "right" versus "wrong" and other language's VMs/interpreters not needing to make such guarantees to themselves or to others. None of these are really ever "right" versus "wrong", almost all of them are trade-offs described as "best practices" and we take the word "best" too strongly especially when we don't know/examine/explore the trade-off context it originated from (and sometimes wrongly assuming that "best" means "universally the best").
goto11 5y ago
I believe joining an array of strings is still faster in JavaScript, since the combined size can be known up front.

WorldMaker 5y ago

I know JS's case somewhat well and the lesson there is not the comment such as above that "it just does the right thing". JS doesn't use a "String Builder" under the hood with a lot of string + calls, but instead that JS does subtly the "wrong" thing as an optimization: in the .NET CLR strings are always, always immutable (or they are not strings according to guarantees that the CLR makes). JS lives in a single language VM that makes no such guarantees, and often lives in strictly single threaded worlds where the VM doesn't have to guarantee the immutability of strings to anyone at the binary memory layout level, so most JS VMs are free to do the "wrong thing" (from the .NET CLR perspective) and just mutably alter strings under the hood as a deliberate optimization. There's a lot of interesting conflations of "right" versus "wrong" in this this thread. There's the C# "best practices" "right" versus "wrong" of knowing when to choose things like StringBuilder over string.Concat or string's + operator overloading (which does just call string.Concat under the hood). There's the "does that right/wrong" apply to other languages question? (The answer is far more complex than just "right" and "wrong".) There's the VM guarantees of .NET CLR's hard line "no string is mutable" setting a somewhat hard "right" versus "wrong" and other language's VMs/interpreters not needing to make such guarantees to themselves or to others. None of these are really ever "right" versus "wrong", almost all of them are trade-offs described as "best practices" and we take the word "best" too strongly especially when we don't know/examine/explore the trade-off context it originated from (and sometimes wrongly assuming that "best" means "universally the best").

goto11 5y ago

I believe joining an array of strings is still faster in JavaScript, since the combined size can be known up front.