Fabulous article on benchmarking JIT optimised VMs: performance can vary massively, warmups can be unpredictable, optimisation sometimes hurts perf and you may not even reach a steady state!
https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/why_arent_more_users_more_happy_with_our_vms_part_1.html
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It's so strange that we talk about languages being slow, and have done for years. Computer performance has increased so much in this time.
https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/is-python-slow/ (shared on HN in 2009) discusses Python being slow. My underpowered Thinkpad has 20x the single-threaded performance! https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/73vs3766/AMD-Athlon-64-4000+-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-PRO-4650U
Maybe *relative* performance of languages matters more?
Today I learnt that Racket *intentionally* doesn't have a traditional REPL workflow. The authors were concerned about students not understanding the state between the current session and the code on disk.
(Arguably Jupyter has some of these features now.)
https://blog.racket-lang.org/2009/03/the-drscheme-repl-isnt-the-one-in-emacs.html
One day I am going to reach the height of technological sophistication, and every clock in my house will handle daylight savings automatically.
I'm not there yet. I think modern appliances are getting better though.
(Does a microwave really need to know the current time?)