[fenomas]

The inodes thing was about lack of 64-bit ints specifically. As I understand it, it was a bug where Node converted inode values to floats (instead of using strings or pairs of 32-bit ints or whatever). One could argue that the bug wouldn't have happened if JS had 64-bit ints, but anyway it's not a foundational thing.

The performance implication of JS not having ints is a different matter. In practice, if you write code that treats a variable like an int, modern JS engines will correctly compile that into bytecode where it really is an int, and performance will be as expected.

So the lack of an int type doesn't really hurt performance, though one can argue that it makes it harder to write performant code.