5 ms·

What does it mean "blazing fast"? Every new thing is blazingly fast nowadays.. deno, bun, turbopack, etc. I don't even know what does it mean to me as a user, d

What does it mean "blazing fast"? Every new thing is blazingly fast nowadays.. deno, bun, turbopack, etc. I don't even know what does it mean to me as a user, does it really super fast or it is just some fancy words. "blazingly fast" compared to what?

o_m 3y ago
It is a meme, but at the same time performance has become a popular selling point again.
- lionkor 3y ago
  Saying "It's super fast" isn't a selling point. facebook/zstd has performance as a selling point, by doing extensive benchmarks and presenting them.
resonious 3y ago
I'm starting to wonder why people are saying their stuff is fast. Much of the time there's no benchmark.
oefrha 3y ago
Especially considering that SpiderMonkey is definitively not blazing fast compared to V8 or JSC, for common web workloads anyway. At most it’s comparable. Somehow doubt adding a layer of wasm indirection makes it faster. But I suppose everything is indeed blazing fast when compared to no target at all.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Yeah they have to sell bytecode based runtimes, never done before.
lionkor 3y ago
They use Rust (i like Rust), so they have to somehow convince themselves that their mess of overly abstracted code strewn across 2000 crates is, in fact, very very fast and it's all worth it. I think people use a language like Rust because they hear its got potential for performance, but its told to them like so: "Rust is blazing fast!". So they perpetuate that idea, and just hope to god that their program, even if its horribly cache-inefficient, allocates aggressively, context switches constantly, etc. is still fast enough that it feels fast. Also, of course, on dev machines which often have high end hardware, it probably does feel very fast. "I can't even see any time between input and result, its so fast!", said the programmer running his script on an overclocked i9-9900k with nothing else open To be clear, nothing about Rust or C or C++ is fast. They allow you to write faster code than most other languages, some more easily than others. All of those you can easily write the slowest code imaginable in. Try doing a bunch of very expensive copies in C# or Java - youd have to go out of your way. In C++ its default behavior.
- devjab 3y ago
  I’m struggling to understand what you mean. Why on earth would you compare whatever poorly optimised concept you have in your head with .Net or the JVM? Like really? How is that helpful or even remotely related to the problem at hand? The idea here is to write service workers which are more efficient than nodeJS service workers, and winterJS seems to succeed very well at this. It doesn’t really matter what goes into the build process, it’s what happens once it’s executed we care about and if you have any Java or C# code to rival or surpass WinterJS then I really think you should share it. I’m sorry if you’re one of the developers who’s stuck on Java or C# and feeling frustrated for whatever reasons. The JVM is fast and will continue to power much of the world for decades to come, and C#, well, it’s probably not going anywhere either. But what you’re writing about here doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the greater scheme of things. Right now, the client side of things is JavaScript and while we build it in a lot of different ways it’s hard to argue against the need for better service workers until we have a suitable replacement, which we likely won’t have in our careers.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Cough, native apps.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lionkor 3y ago
    I'm saying languages with a Runtime and everything-is-a-(nullable)-reference dont have this issue of programmers being able to write super awful code. There is a clear limit to how slow simple looking code can be in C# or java, whereas languages like C++ (which I have a few years experience in) definitely allow you to write the worlds slowest code without the code looking like it. Maybe you expected me to have a combative point due to my introduction, but i dont - im just pointing out that people use languages like Rust and C++ thinking they are fast, when really, an inexperienced programmer in either will write slower code than an inexperienced programmer in a lot of other languages. They feel they dont need benchmarks, because their language is "fast".
mstade 3y ago
Yeah this kind of statement drives me up the wall. It's even more annoying when they do show some benchmark stats, but don't provide any details on how to run the benchmark yourself.
keyle 3y ago
Blazing fast is so fast, one cannot measure it. You'd try and fail because, woof, it's gone. And you know it's good because it has Zing! in it. Comes free with most snake oil marketing kit.
typosaur 3y ago
I assume they mean startup speed (cold-start). Since they're not using JIT (WASM doesn't support it) the runtime performance will be miles beyond V8 and JSC.
gregd 3y ago
I'm on old curmudgeon and just want to go back to saying, "C#...It's fast enough!"
- ianberdin 3y ago
  A good catch. Blazing fast when your webpack's build decreases from 40 seconds to 400 milliseconds: https://esbuild.github.io/ https://esbuild.github.io/ Anything else marketing staff.
rickstanley 3y ago
I never understood the meaning of using "tm" with "blazing fast" and "it just works", is it a joke that is well known in tech?
- yurishimo 3y ago
  Yes. "It just works" is a famous Apple meme. Others using "tm" are memeing on companies that come up with stupid marketing names for every little thing that doesn't require any branding at all.
sfink 3y ago
Something that helps me: instead of reading "blazing/blazingly fast" as "blazingly fast", read it as "blazingly fast". As in, it is fast at doing whatever it's doing, as are almost all entrants in... whatever this stuff is. But it is doing it in a way that is figuratively analogous to a large conflagration. Whatever is running on it will end up a blackened, twisted pile of wreckage. Perhaps after achieving its purpose, perhaps a bit before. I'm not saying that's what they're saying, but I am saying it's a valid interpretation of what they're saying. It's worth speculating about which interpretation better fits the subject at hand.

o_m 3y ago

It is a meme, but at the same time performance has become a popular selling point again.

lionkor 3y ago
Saying "It's super fast" isn't a selling point. facebook/zstd has performance as a selling point, by doing extensive benchmarks and presenting them.

resonious 3y ago

I'm starting to wonder why people are saying their stuff is fast. Much of the time there's no benchmark.

oefrha 3y ago

Especially considering that SpiderMonkey is definitively not blazing fast compared to V8 or JSC, for common web workloads anyway. At most it’s comparable. Somehow doubt adding a layer of wasm indirection makes it faster. But I suppose everything is indeed blazing fast when compared to no target at all.

pjmlp 3y ago
Yeah they have to sell bytecode based runtimes, never done before.

lionkor 3y ago

They use Rust (i like Rust), so they have to somehow convince themselves that their mess of overly abstracted code strewn across 2000 crates is, in fact, very very fast and it's all worth it. I think people use a language like Rust because they hear its got potential for performance, but its told to them like so: "Rust is blazing fast!". So they perpetuate that idea, and just hope to god that their program, even if its horribly cache-inefficient, allocates aggressively, context switches constantly, etc. is still fast enough that it feels fast. Also, of course, on dev machines which often have high end hardware, it probably does feel very fast. "I can't even see any time between input and result, its so fast!", said the programmer running his script on an overclocked i9-9900k with nothing else open To be clear, nothing about Rust or C or C++ is fast. They allow you to write faster code than most other languages, some more easily than others. All of those you can easily write the slowest code imaginable in. Try doing a bunch of very expensive copies in C# or Java - youd have to go out of your way. In C++ its default behavior.

devjab 3y ago
I’m struggling to understand what you mean. Why on earth would you compare whatever poorly optimised concept you have in your head with .Net or the JVM? Like really? How is that helpful or even remotely related to the problem at hand? The idea here is to write service workers which are more efficient than nodeJS service workers, and winterJS seems to succeed very well at this. It doesn’t really matter what goes into the build process, it’s what happens once it’s executed we care about and if you have any Java or C# code to rival or surpass WinterJS then I really think you should share it. I’m sorry if you’re one of the developers who’s stuck on Java or C# and feeling frustrated for whatever reasons. The JVM is fast and will continue to power much of the world for decades to come, and C#, well, it’s probably not going anywhere either. But what you’re writing about here doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the greater scheme of things. Right now, the client side of things is JavaScript and while we build it in a lot of different ways it’s hard to argue against the need for better service workers until we have a suitable replacement, which we likely won’t have in our careers.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Cough, native apps.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lionkor 3y ago
  I'm saying languages with a Runtime and everything-is-a-(nullable)-reference dont have this issue of programmers being able to write super awful code. There is a clear limit to how slow simple looking code can be in C# or java, whereas languages like C++ (which I have a few years experience in) definitely allow you to write the worlds slowest code without the code looking like it. Maybe you expected me to have a combative point due to my introduction, but i dont - im just pointing out that people use languages like Rust and C++ thinking they are fast, when really, an inexperienced programmer in either will write slower code than an inexperienced programmer in a lot of other languages. They feel they dont need benchmarks, because their language is "fast".

mstade 3y ago

Yeah this kind of statement drives me up the wall. It's even more annoying when they do show some benchmark stats, but don't provide any details on how to run the benchmark yourself.

keyle 3y ago

Blazing fast is so fast, one cannot measure it. You'd try and fail because, woof, it's gone. And you know it's good because it has Zing! in it. Comes free with most snake oil marketing kit.

typosaur 3y ago

I assume they mean startup speed (cold-start). Since they're not using JIT (WASM doesn't support it) the runtime performance will be miles beyond V8 and JSC.

gregd 3y ago

I'm on old curmudgeon and just want to go back to saying, "C#...It's fast enough!"

ianberdin 3y ago
A good catch. Blazing fast when your webpack's build decreases from 40 seconds to 400 milliseconds: https://esbuild.github.io/ https://esbuild.github.io/ Anything else marketing staff.

rickstanley 3y ago

I never understood the meaning of using "tm" with "blazing fast" and "it just works", is it a joke that is well known in tech?

yurishimo 3y ago
Yes. "It just works" is a famous Apple meme. Others using "tm" are memeing on companies that come up with stupid marketing names for every little thing that doesn't require any branding at all.

sfink 3y ago

Something that helps me: instead of reading "blazing/blazingly fast" as "blazingly fast", read it as "blazingly fast". As in, it is fast at doing whatever it's doing, as are almost all entrants in... whatever this stuff is. But it is doing it in a way that is figuratively analogous to a large conflagration. Whatever is running on it will end up a blackened, twisted pile of wreckage. Perhaps after achieving its purpose, perhaps a bit before. I'm not saying that's what they're saying, but I am saying it's a valid interpretation of what they're saying. It's worth speculating about which interpretation better fits the subject at hand.