Someone needs to take jwz aside...

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 7 June 2011 16:22, Matt Sergeant <msergeant at messagelabs.com> wrote:
> As someone else who has written a bunch of popular perl stuff over the
> years, I'll chime in here too - I write a lot less open source stuff these
> days, but when I do I'm looking much more to JavaScript. The language is
> actually about as good as Perl (some areas better, some worse), but the
> implementation, the interpreters, are just WAY faster.
>
> https://github.com/baudehlo/Haraka

Javascript proponents always used to say that the language would scrub
up quite nicely if browser vendors actually bothered to work on it!
And of course, being a much *simpler* language than Perl, it's not
surprising that it's been possible to apply some great optimisations
on it.  Some more details and write-up on your actual benchmarks would
be really interesting.

While Javascript-the-language is lovely (as you say, better in some
respects, worse in others, than Perl), that's only one part of the
story.  I've not followed Javascript-the-platform that closely (i.e.
anything much beyond jQuery) - what's your experience been like,
working with Node and other libraries?

Perl->Javascript is a really interesting migration path I'd not
considered, and I'm not sure "it's faster!" would convince me on its
own -- we all know there are faster languages than Perl.  But... JS
does have a significant advantages over, say, Perl->Haskell, as
Javascript is so widespread and therefore has many(devs, projects,
jobs).

osf'