4 ms·

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I meant that it's had the most manpower dedicated to optimising it, not that it's necessarily the most optimal. It's hard to

by samhw 5y ago

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I meant that it's had the most manpower dedicated to optimising it, not that it's necessarily the most optimal. It's hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons in that respect, given the significant differences between different language specifications. (For instance, it's hard for anyone to write a reference-compliant interpreter for Python which is as fast as the interpreter they could write for, say, Ada or Haskell.)

danachow 5y ago
Well you did say: “ NodeJS relies on V8, which is perhaps the world's most highly optimised interpreter (/JIT compiler/runner)” But even in manpower this is pretty hyperbolic compared to Java and .NET. There was probably more manpower in even some of the third party Java runtimes like Azul.
- samhw 5y ago
  > Well you did say: "NodeJS relies on V8, which is perhaps the world's most highly optimised interpreter (/JIT compiler/runner)" Yes, and that's exactly what I meant. It's undergone the most optimisation. That doesn't mean the result will necessarily be more performant than some other interpreter for a different language which is simpler to interpret. By that logic, I could write an 'x86 interpreter' which would blow LuaJIT out of the water... > But even in manpower this is pretty hyperbolic compared to Java and .NET. I wasn't including Java because it's not strictly an interpreted language, though I admit you could write a whole book about the philosophical differences between V8's abstract machine vs Java's bytecode VM. .NET I don't know so much about. As far as I'm aware, .NET hasn't had as much manpower invested, though Java has & would certainly beat V8 if you included it.
yccs27 5y ago
That is precisely the point jvanderbot made: nodejs has less-than-optimal performance, and not for lack of trying to improve it. Its hard to write fast implementations of js or python, so they should not be used where speed matters.
- samhw 5y ago
  > nodejs has less-than-optimal performance, and not for lack of trying to improve it I think you mean "less-than-C" performance, no? I'd say it's pretty close to optimal performance - it's just that the optimum is not that high compared with a stricter language, or indeed a compiled language, which are able to exploit far more invariants (especially in the latter case). Anyway, I think his point was fundamentally correct, but it just seemed like an odd choice to single out one of the world's best interpreters - and one which is fairly competitive even with fast compiled languages - as your example. If he'd chosen CPython, I'd have been with him all the way, haha. (As someone who's written a faster Python interpreter, ...don't even get me started on that one.)

by samhw 5y ago

danachow 5y ago

Well you did say: “ NodeJS relies on V8, which is perhaps the world's most highly optimised interpreter (/JIT compiler/runner)” But even in manpower this is pretty hyperbolic compared to Java and .NET. There was probably more manpower in even some of the third party Java runtimes like Azul.

samhw 5y ago
> Well you did say: "NodeJS relies on V8, which is perhaps the world's most highly optimised interpreter (/JIT compiler/runner)" Yes, and that's exactly what I meant. It's undergone the most optimisation. That doesn't mean the result will necessarily be more performant than some other interpreter for a different language which is simpler to interpret. By that logic, I could write an 'x86 interpreter' which would blow LuaJIT out of the water... > But even in manpower this is pretty hyperbolic compared to Java and .NET. I wasn't including Java because it's not strictly an interpreted language, though I admit you could write a whole book about the philosophical differences between V8's abstract machine vs Java's bytecode VM. .NET I don't know so much about. As far as I'm aware, .NET hasn't had as much manpower invested, though Java has & would certainly beat V8 if you included it.

yccs27 5y ago

That is precisely the point jvanderbot made: nodejs has less-than-optimal performance, and not for lack of trying to improve it. Its hard to write fast implementations of js or python, so they should not be used where speed matters.

samhw 5y ago
> nodejs has less-than-optimal performance, and not for lack of trying to improve it I think you mean "less-than-C" performance, no? I'd say it's pretty close to optimal performance - it's just that the optimum is not that high compared with a stricter language, or indeed a compiled language, which are able to exploit far more invariants (especially in the latter case). Anyway, I think his point was fundamentally correct, but it just seemed like an odd choice to single out one of the world's best interpreters - and one which is fairly competitive even with fast compiled languages - as your example. If he'd chosen CPython, I'd have been with him all the way, haha. (As someone who's written a faster Python interpreter, ...don't even get me started on that one.)