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Why javascript for everything?

Mitansh Panchal on December 28, 2022

JavaScript is a programming language that is essential for modern web development. It is a versatile language that can be used to build a wide rang...
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José Pablo Ramírez Vargas

While I agree with all points, let's not forget that there are strong points against its use. The most important one: Performance.

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Tracy Gilmore

Hi José,
I would agree the title is a little misleading. I am a JS fan and accept there are use cases for which JS is not at all appropriate. Performance of the JS engines is improving all the time but JS will never achieve the performance of a language like C, C++ or Rust. But then same could be said for C# and Java as they typically operate in a runtime engine.
However, I think the main point Mitansh was make was, for all its flaws, there are many things that make JS a good language to learn and have under your belt.
I am not sure what full-stack developers would do without it.

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José Pablo Ramírez Vargas

And I agree. I even liked the post. I just thought fair to caution unexperienced readers about the fact that cons do exist.

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Rense Bakker

That's kind of a big generalization... What are you comparing it to exactly? JavaScript itself is rarely the cause of bad performance...

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José Pablo Ramírez Vargas

In the server arena, pretty much anything is better than NodeJS in terms of number of transactions. Java servers double the number of transactions; .Net does 10 times more the number of transactions.

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Rense Bakker

That's not really true. NodeJS has extremely high throughput. Only in certain circumstances is NodeJS not a good choice. When you have very long running tasks for example, or when your task(s) needs to allocate a lot of memory.