Hacker News Reader

And then the punchline: computers have gigabytes of RAM, multiple cores with multiple GHz, yet they run slow.

Computers run very fast, it's software that runs slow.

I'd be curious to see how many clock cycles something as simple as "x = y + z" (Where all three variables are integers) takes in various languages.

The compiled languages would likely output a single MOV and ADD and get done in 2 cycles (plus any time to fetch from memory). Something like Python probably takes a couple hundred with all its type checking. JIT languages I would think would take a couple hundred the first time the line gets executed, but then have a single MOV and ADD ready the next time, unless I'm completely misunderstanding JIT.

Software is fast. It’s the user that is slow

Users are very fast, it's the muscles that are slow

Reply on news.ycombinator.com