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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Looks like you didn't actually look at the link :)

> The greatest trick that javascript ever pulled was to convince the latest generation of programmers that it was fast...

By the way, JavaScript IS quite fast. I ported some code from Swift to Typescript recently, and its runtime went down from 15 seconds to 2 seconds. It wasn't a 1-1 port because I improved things, so it is not a fair comparison, but I was very positively surprised.

> It wasn't a 1-1 port because I improved things

Hmm, I think we found the reason....

I don't think you did! Doing the same improvements in Swift I wouldn't expect an over seven time speedup. I suspect that the time difference has to do with data structures like hashmaps, which in Swift are defacto immutable, and in JavaScript are not.

I actually did. Clicked on it once, looked at it for about 3 seconds, decided it would be a waste of my time to check it out more.

Which means you didn't actually understand what it was about, which was the point of the comment ;)

I don't disagree. Understanding things takes time, and most things are not worth understanding them.

And then you feel it's not a waste of time to write a comment on an article you took 3sec to understand and skip?

No, as I just wanted to share my anti-procrastination tool. I also like chatting with HNers (some more than others)!

Spent more time writing these pointless comments

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