Comment by laurencerowe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurencerowe | Hacker News Reader

SPy is a cool experiment which we should applaud, though perhaps it would be helpful to compare to ShedSkin, Nuitka, or maybe Numba along with Cython if the eventual goal is compile everything to Wasm.

I'd maybe quibble with "running natively on WebAssembly with speed in the same order of magnitude as Rust" given I expect that statement would be just as true if you replaced Rust on WebAssembly with the equivalent JavaScript.

But ultimately while I understand the motivation - at the beginning of my career before I discovered Python I wanted to write command line scripts in PHP because that was what I knew! - I think it is ultimately a dead end since by breaking from the Python ecosystem you end up having to compete against JavaScript which is not really that far from Python and has an existing library ecosystem to plug into.

> I'd maybe quibble with "running natively on WebAssembly with speed in the same order of magnitude as Rust" given I expect that statement would be just as true if you replaced Rust on WebAssembly with the equivalent JavaScript.

This is incorrect. It's widely publicized that WebAssembly is often faster than JavaScript.

While WebAssembly definitely has advantages in terms of faster startup time, throughput is the same order of magnitude as equivalent JavaScript, perhaps 30% faster unless you are using WebAssembly only features like SIMD.

Of course the big advantage from using a language designed for lower level work is that you are far less likely to hit performance pitfalls. But if you write JavaScript as if it were C you tend to get very good performance.

I am sceptical that SPy will manage to beat JavaScript performance wise on average. But I'm interested to see how they do in part because of their learnings could make JavaScript in WebAssembly faster. (WebAssembly has much faster startup than JS which makes per request isolation practical if JS in WASM gets fast enough.)

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