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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Video game developer here. A lot of anti-optimiation sentiment are just excuses and/or part of some dumb trend.
Oh no, compiled languages require you to choose between variable types! Better use Javascript.
Why should we develop a proper portable app environment when we have Electron? It can even run in browsers. Imagine if you didn't had to go to your pops to install the word processor, instead he just types in wordprocessor dot app into the browser?
What if code was so easy to understand you didn't had to document it, and each macroblock of a function instead were a named function, so they'd be automatically documented?
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm currently writing my own scripting VM, as most others have their own limitations, and would introduce a barely usable build system to my game engine (which are their own can of worms). Code as data is a very useful feature, but having to include DLL files as scripts would be very complicated due to platform differences, although also very fast. Issue comes when people treat scripting languages as full-fledged programming languages, and even scaring away beginners from compiled languages, because you have to compile them, you have to choose a type, etc.
The real irony is that you can make games entirely with Javascript (no backend server needed) and I wouldn't be surprised if some of those games, even with 3D rendering via three.js or babylonjs, performed better than certain websites
I just want to point out that interpreted languages don't have to be slow. For example, LuaJIT is competitive with Java in terms of performance, and not that much slower than C. Likewise, PyPy is almost always consistently faster than CPython, and Python 3.13 will have a JIT. I've also used numba to improve performance in Python (got close enough to naive Rust to not be worth adding Rust to our pipeline).
If you want scripting languages to be fast, there are options, so the decision should instead be made based on the benefits of each. For example:
I'm super interested in Rust because it catches way more common errors than most compiled languages, so you're getting a lot more value for that compile step. My day job is Python + Javascript, though I have nearly 10 years with Go and most of my personal projects use Rust these days, so I feel like I'm fairly experienced here.
I agree. There are good reasons to prefer scripting languages to compiled languages and vice versa, but most people don't seem to decide based on those reasons, they often decide based on what's easier to hire for, what they're familiar with, or what's already being used.
I'm super excited about Rust gaining traction because it's basically the best case for a compiled language I've seen. Maybe it'll revise the trend toward higher level languages and encourage a bit more provable correctness.