cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31184706

C is one of the top languages in terms of speed, memory and energy

https://www.threads.com/@engineerscodex/post/C9_R-uhvGbv?hl=en

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[–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Also the difference between TS and JS doesn't make sense at first glance. 🤷‍♂️ I guess I need to read the research.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (3 children)

    It does, the "compiler" adds a bunch of extra garbage for extra safety that really does have an impact.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I thought the idea of TS is that it strongly types everything so that the JS interpreter doesn't waste all of its time trying to figure out the best way to store a variable in RAM.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The code is ultimately ran in a JS interpreter. AFAIK TS transpiles into JS, there's no TS specific interpreter. But such a huge difference is unexpected to me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Its really not, have you noticed how an enum is transpiled? you end up with a function... a lot of other things follow the same pattern.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Nope, have not noticed because I hate JavaScript with a passion. Thanks for educating me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    No they don't. Enums are actually unique in being the only Typescript feature that requires code gen, and they consider that to have been a mistake.

    In any case that's not the cause of the difference here.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    This isn't true, there are other features that "emit code", that includes: namespaces, decorators and some cases even async / await (when targeting ES5 or ES6).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Ah yeah I forgot about namespaces. I don't think they're a popular feature.

    The other two only generate code for backwards compatibility. When targeting the latest JavaScript versions they don't generate anything.

    Ok decorators are technically still only a proposal so they're slightly jumping the gun there, but the point remains.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Only if you choose a lower language level as the target. Given these results I suspect the researchers had it output JS for something like ES5, meaning a bunch of polyfills for old browsers that they didn't include in the JS-native implementation..

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah sure, you found the one notorious TypeScript feature that actually emits code, but a) this feature is recommended against and not used much to my knowledge and, more importantly, b) you cannot tell me that you genuinely believe the use of TypeScript enums – which generate extra function calls for a very limited number of operations – will 5x the energy consumption of the entire program.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)