Re:Hard-won lessons: Five years with Node.js
by acdha on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:23AM
(#14155706)
> V8 is a world class compiler. Compared to ruby, Python, Erlang, php and that ilk it is lightning quick.
I've heard that a lot but advocacy always seems to be based on artificial benchmarks. Most server apps are I/O bound and the ones which aren't tend to bottleneck in native code – i.e. a gzip implementation would run faster in V8 than python, ruby, etc. but since they're just calling a C library, it's a question of whether V8 is faster than GCC/Clang.
One area where this is more interesting is async support, but the argument then is that it's easier to write async code in JS than other languages and reasonable people disagree on that point.
I'm not saying that V8 isn't an impressive bit of work, just that most of the advocacy I've seen has reminded me of the JVM hype cycle before most people learned that a JIT mattered a lot less than their architectural choices.
I've heard that a lot but advocacy always seems to be based on artificial benchmarks. Most server apps are I/O bound and the ones which aren't tend to bottleneck in native code – i.e. a gzip implementation would run faster in V8 than python, ruby, etc. but since they're just calling a C library, it's a question of whether V8 is faster than GCC/Clang.
One area where this is more interesting is async support, but the argument then is that it's easier to write async code in JS than other languages and reasonable people disagree on that point.
I'm not saying that V8 isn't an impressive bit of work, just that most of the advocacy I've seen has reminded me of the JVM hype cycle before most people learned that a JIT mattered a lot less than their architectural choices.