JS have been heavily optimized by browser vendors, fueled by the intense competition on the browser space, and the huge resources invested by companies like Google.
IIRC Firefox 3 was the first browser to have what we would call a modern JS engine, with heavy emphasis on JIT compiling. Google Chrome soon followed and V8 dominated the JS perf story.
Python doesn't have such fierce competition of implementations. And besides, it has the "escape hatch" of being able to implement performance-critical code paths as C extensions, which is what heavy-lifting libraries like numpy do.
I think they were refering to a lack of interpreter competition. Sure there is pypy, jython, ironpython etc. But they arent competing. They are just used for different usecases.
In the browser space their has been a lot of competition to make the fastest js runtime because it makes the browser faster.
Comments
JS have been heavily optimized by browser vendors, fueled by the intense competition on the browser space, and the huge resources invested by companies like Google.
IIRC Firefox 3 was the first browser to have what we would call a modern JS engine, with heavy emphasis on JIT compiling. Google Chrome soon followed and V8 dominated the JS perf story.
Python doesn't have such fierce competition of implementations. And besides, it has the "escape hatch" of being able to implement performance-critical code paths as C extensions, which is what heavy-lifting libraries like numpy do.
Python have many competitions, but the language lack some sort of spec and the only reference is CPython.
I think they were refering to a lack of interpreter competition. Sure there is pypy, jython, ironpython etc. But they arent competing. They are just used for different usecases.
In the browser space their has been a lot of competition to make the fastest js runtime because it makes the browser faster.