> For such a small program ... the performance difference can be reduced significantly. I think you're wrong. Small programs don't necessarily minimize the dif

> For such a small program ... the performance difference can be reduced significantly. I think you're wrong. Small programs don't necessarily minimize the difference between languages. Small programs often exacerbate them. Often for weird, idiosyncratic reasons. Especially if you're measuring time-to-first-byte, and not letting the VM warm up. For example, in this case I wouldn't be surprised if most of the CPU time was going into node + v8's startup, rather than executing the user's javascript at all. Look at the plaintext techempower benchmarks[1]. These benchmarks test tiny amounts of code - the programs only have to respond with "hello world" HTTP responses. The best performers are hitting hardware limits. If your theory that small program = small relative cost of using javascript was true, nodejs's performance should be similar to rust / C++. It is not - node is only 13% of the performance of the top performers. Weirdly "justjs" (another v8 based runtime) is ~5x faster than nodejs on this test. The reason probably has nothing to do with javascript at all, and is because justjs has less overhead and talks to the OS in a more efficient way. (It probably uses io_ring.) But maybe this is evidence you're technically correct. The performance differences can be reduced. But we have every reason to assume nodejs will have way more overhead than rust at executing the same code. In all, I agree with other posters. A benchmark showing rust on fastly is faster than javascript on cloudflare tells us nothing about the underlying hosting providers. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=ph&test=plaintext https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...