alt Hacker NewsIt depends on a lot. If you need to go fast, look to assembly.
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It depends on what you're writing and what the scope is. Here's a good quote about this from Steve Yegge, from his time working at Geoworks (company that did an entire desktop OS written entirely in 8086 assembly as a competitor to Windows for low-end PCs). https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-s...
> I went to the University of Washington and [then] I got hired by this company called Geoworks, doing assembly-language programming, and I did it for five years. To us, the Geoworkers, we wrote a whole operating system, the libraries, drivers, apps, you know: a desktop operating system in assembly. 8086 assembly! It wasn't even good assembly! We had four registers! [Plus the] si [register] if you counted, you know, if you counted 386, right? It was horrible.
> I mean, actually we kind of liked it. It was Object-Oriented Assembly. It's amazing what you can talk yourself into liking, which is the real irony of all this. And to us, C++ was the ultimate in Roman decadence. I mean, it was equivalent to going and vomiting so you could eat more. They had IF! We had jump CX zero! Right? They had "Objects". Well we did too, but I mean they had syntax for it, right? I mean it was all just such weeniness. And we knew that we could outperform any compiler out there because at the time, we could!
> The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's going off this way, right?
> This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is just really slow, it's like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times.
> Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore!
> Small systems are not only easier to optimize, they're possible to optimize. And I mean globally optimize.
As I just posted, any speed comparison needs to be based on specific implementations (compiler A vs compiler B), not languages.
When it comes to assembly, the "compiler" is the person writing the code, and while assembly gives you the maximum flexibility to potentially equal or outperform any compiler for any language, there are not too many people with the skill to do that, especially when writing large programs (which due to the effort required are rarely written in assembler). In general there is much more potential for improving the speed of programs by changing the design and using better algorithms, which is where high level languages offer a big benefit by making this easier.