Yes I think we all agree. As I said in my post above:
>> Thanks to V8 you can definitely achieve good enough performance with JavaScript for most applications
The point I argued above isn’t that JS is slow. It’s that JS will probably always be slower than well written C code. I still write far more JS than C, because my time is usually more valuable than the computer’s.
That said, games are far from the only place where every ms counts. Performance matters in database servers, operating systems, real-time applications (eg robotics), text editor typing latency, UI responsiveness, 3d modelling software, video encoding, cryptocurrency mining, browser DOM rendering and so on.
I love JS, but native code is not a special case. Despite the best efforts of Electron, I suspect most of the globe’s aggregate clock cycles are spent running code written in languages other than JavaScript.
Thankfully the world of managed languages is not constrained to JavaScript, nor C is the only option for unmanaged ones, a language that we would consider no respectful games programmer would use, after all a good game engine should be written in Assembly.
Ironically it is now used as the language to beat.
>> Thanks to V8 you can definitely achieve good enough performance with JavaScript for most applications
The point I argued above isn’t that JS is slow. It’s that JS will probably always be slower than well written C code. I still write far more JS than C, because my time is usually more valuable than the computer’s.
That said, games are far from the only place where every ms counts. Performance matters in database servers, operating systems, real-time applications (eg robotics), text editor typing latency, UI responsiveness, 3d modelling software, video encoding, cryptocurrency mining, browser DOM rendering and so on.
I love JS, but native code is not a special case. Despite the best efforts of Electron, I suspect most of the globe’s aggregate clock cycles are spent running code written in languages other than JavaScript.