Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xcafecafe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of global warming is caused by inefficient code written in higher level languages requiring more powerful hardware to run. It might be infinitesimal but still non-zero.

View on HN

"Javascript is literally killing the Earth" might be the most HN comment I've ever read

The NoScript crowd must be proud.

Technically JavaScript is only ~7% slower then C++ to execute. But snipe away at that stats with real data.

Technically, maybe. In practice, each language has its culture, its ecosystem. Its set of tools to pick from. Is it reasonable to expect the JavaScript Office will really just bind directly to all the native APIs it was using before, thus incurring only 7% penalty (+/- FFI)? Or is it more likely that it'll have web rendering shoved in everywhere, and then layers upon layers of off-the-shelf JS libraries, thus incuring more like 700% penalty in resource use?

Doesn't it depend on the benchmark? Yes, for some numeric problem as described here (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/algorithmic-performance-compa...), the 7% figure seems reasonable. But for a real world app with object creation/deletion, the C++ memory model at a lower level would provide a much better performance over a garbage collected higher level one.

And even if (hypotheically) the performance difference a constant 7%, that is still a tangible cost.

The real problem is DOM, not the language or its implementations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com