You're still making a false equivalence and a bad analogy, whatevers.

So I'll make an analogy too: A turtle -vs- a snail are the same order of magnitude slow. The Nazis -vs- the protesters are not of the same order of magnitude evil in Charlottesville, just like forking a new process -vs- dynamically dispatching to a function in the same process are not of the same order of magnitude slow in Unix.

And I'll reiterate:

With Python (and JavaScript) it's POSSIBLE and even NORMAL for a JIT compiler to optimize the code to call mul instructions directly. PyPy is a thing, it's free, and it works just fine, thank you:

https://pypy.org/

But it's IMPOSSIBLE to implement a bash JIT compiler (or even AOT compiler) that optimizes out the millions of instructions that are required to make a system call to fork "bc" to call that same "mul" instruction. In Linux, you simply can't optimize out system calls. (Unless Alexia Massalin's Synthesis kernel is giving you a free piggy back ride ;).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexia_Massalin

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~manku/quals/summaries/gribble-s...

And no, integrating "bc" into bash isn't a valid solution, or they would have done it ages ago. How about integrating the canvas API into bash too, while you're at it? Tell me when you convince them to accept your pull request!