But, in "real programs", all this doesn't usually matter b/c clever JIT tricks with loops and branches fail to offset 5-10x the memory use and the abysmal corresponding CPU cache hit rate.
5-10x the memory use? Only if coders smoked something. I agree that JITed runtime has some overhead, but in a great majority of cases it is far below what you write here.
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But, in "real programs", all this doesn't usually matter b/c clever JIT tricks with loops and branches fail to offset 5-10x the memory use and the abysmal corresponding CPU cache hit rate.
See "branch misprediction" vs. "fetch from main memory" on norvig's rough timings list: http://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers .
5-10x the memory use? Only if coders smoked something. I agree that JITed runtime has some overhead, but in a great majority of cases it is far below what you write here.