When you get down to basics, JS has arrays, structs, ints, floats, and strings+regex (both backed by very fast C++ implementations. If you stick to these things

When you get down to basics, JS has arrays, structs, ints, floats, and strings+regex (both backed by very fast C++ implementations. If you stick to these things as if they were C analogs, the performance potential is very high. Viewed in those terms, it shouldn't be surprising that JS can be incredibly fast (faster than C in some cases).