[Techtalk] interpreted vs. compiled languages

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Wed Jun 10 00:28:44 UTC 2009


Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> writes:

> Assuming a programmer has reasonable skills, are there (generally speaking)
> significant performance differences between interpreted vs. compiled
> languages?

Probably not, for most practical purposes.  Unless your application is
performing a lot of heavy numeric computation, or if it runs over the
Internet, performance is probably dominated by I/O waits anyhow.

As Michael mentioned, there is also a significant range of performance
variation among "interpreted" languages, especially with the widespread use of
"just in time" compilers.

In fact, in some cases a good JIT can deliver *better* performing code than a
static compiler, using some variant of a "trace tree" model to use runtime
profiling information to guide the compiler, where a static compiler needs
manual tuning to even come close to the same information.

Finally, most practical real world interpreted languages make it easy to call
through to native compiled code for cases when you need the performance that
hand-tuned assembly can deliver (or the JIT doesn't exist, or can't keep up.)

> Sorry if this is too general for a sane answer, feel free to expound,
> pontificate, and wander off on interesting tangents.

I guess a better thing to ask is: why do you ask?

If you tell us what prompted the question it helps us understand why you are
asking, and perhaps to give better (or more useful) answers. :)

Regards,
        Daniel


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