Back in the day, JavaScript was a tacky interpreted language you used as \u201cglue\u201d when putting together Web pages.\u00a0 When I benchmarked it against C for a scientific computation application in 2005, it came in between 27.7 and 46.9 times slower than code compiled with C.<\/p>\n
Well, that was then\u2026.\u00a0 I’ve just completed a series of benchmark tests of JavaScript on platforms which include node.js, Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Firefox, and Apple’s Safari (on both the MacOS X desktop and iOS iPad), and on some of the desktops it runs faster than C and on none of them more than 50% slower.<\/p>\n
For Web developers, this is Big Thing.\u00a0 It used to be you’d code your little hacks within Web pages in JavaScript, but then basically re-do them on the server side since you needed a language which wouldn’t reduce the server to a crawl at peak load periods.<\/p>\n
Now, you can write everything in JavaScript, using node.js on the server side, and happily re-use code between the two platforms.\u00a0 When I developed The Hacker’s Diet Online<\/em><\/a>, using JavaScript on the client and Perl on the server, using a common language would have almost halved the development effort, but in 2007 JavaScript wasn’t up to the job.\u00a0 Now it is.<\/p>\n If you’d like to read the complete benchmark report, here it is<\/a>.\u00a0 You can download the benchmark to run on your own machines from that page.\u00a0 Since the document contains tables, it’s just too painful to re-post here, and all I’d get for doing so is a bunch of TL;DR<\/a> comments.<\/p>\n At this point, I’ll put down the discovery that JavaScript is a programming language fully competitive with legacy languages on both client and server platforms as one of the top things I’ve learned this year, right up there with that the economics of an enormous yet fully-reusable space launcher beat those of a modest-sized rocket you throw away every time.\u00a0 Well, even Elon Musk only figured that out in the last year.<\/p>\n Back in the day, JavaScript was a tacky interpreted language you used as \u201cglue\u201d when putting together Web pages.\u00a0 When I benchmarked it against C for a scientific computation application in 2005, it came in between 27.7 and 46.9 times slower than code compiled with C.<\/p>\n Well, that was then\u2026.\u00a0 I’ve just completed a series of benchmark tests of JavaScript on platforms which include node.js, Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Firefox, and Apple’s Safari (on both the MacOS X desktop and iOS iPad), and on some of the desktops it runs faster than C and on none of them more than 50% slower.<\/p>\n For Web developers, this is Big Thing.\u00a0 It used to be you’d code your little hacks within Web pages in JavaScript, but then basically re-do them on … Continue reading