Re:Performance Showdown: Rust vs Javascript (2020)
by josephg on Friday February 12, 2021 @08:37AM
(#26113479)
My first take at an answer is, what sort of code do I anticipate writing in each language? And what sort of code do I expect to see from my peers?
Rust makes it surprisingly easy to write code that absolutely thrashes the memory allocator - using String/Box/Vec and adding .clone() everywhere makes a lot of tricky borrowing problems go away. Is that the kind of code I expect to be writing? Or running? And if so, we shouldn’t expect that kind of code to perform much better in most cases than javascript.
Re:Performance Showdown: Rust vs Javascript (2020)
by EwanToo on Friday February 12, 2021 @12:03PM
(#26115767)
You're absolutely right, these are the kinds of questions any team should be asking
* Is language X that we all know suitable?" * Is there a language Y that we could all learn in an acceptable time optimal? * What does the tooling look like? * How would we bring in new people?
CPU runtime is just one aspect to consider
1. by how fast it runs when written by a very experienced developer, or
2. by how fast programs run that are written by the "average" programmer, or
3. by how fast it runs when written by a bad or inexprienced programmer?
For each of these I can think of (at least) one language that would beat the performance of any other. There are languages that are "very difficult to use wrong", and there are languages that are difficult to use right. For the latter, C++ is a great example. You will copy and leak yourself out of memory before you terminate, if you dont know what you're doing.
Maybe we should stop comparing random languages from different domains by how fast they run.