Why the New V8 Is So Damn Fast
I used to believe that javascript was slow, C was fast and that there was no way to change this because of the way that javascript is interpreted and not compiled. But the more I've learnt about the benefits of "on the fly" / "just in time" optimising compilers, the more I'm convinced this is the future of computing. Being able to use multiple threads and hence multiple cores simultaneously to optimise what is actually a single threaded piece of code is quite amazing. And then being able to write code that is insanely portable and optimised on any platform is great.You can take advantage of SIMD, hyperthreading, multicore, large caches... without knowing if they're available ahead of time.<p>Sure, you won't beat C for low memory devices or hardware that you have complete control over but for 90% of use cases javascript actually makes sense and can be the most performant.