Accidentally quadratic: When Python is faster than C++
I’ve been thinking about this lately. Can you actually be faster than C? Like, in the sense that you can transpile any bit of Python or Lisp or Haskell or Rust or JS into C but the opposite isn’t necessarily true because not all those language support all the features exposed in C (such as goto, no bounds checking, pointer arithmetic, etc.), any algorithm for say parsing JSON can be expressed equally as efficiently in C, while a clever and hacky C-specific algorithm cannot necessarily be expressed in those higher level languages.<p>In other words, is “faster than C” even a good metric if all it means that “if you implement something inefficiently in C it will be faster than if it is implemented efficiently in not-C”?