[acdha]

JavaScript has multiple companies with valuations measured in billions of USD competing. Optimizing JavaScript is just as hard but they can throw massive development teams at the problem. Python isn’t without resources but the level of scale is dramatically different.

[dragonwriter]

> JavaScript has multiple companies with valuations measured in billions of USD competing.

A couple of them have valuations in the trillions of USD, actually.

[acdha]

Yeah, I thought about that when I was writing that but didn’t want to get into debates about what fraction of those resources they put into web stuff. Even if you ignore the big ones however, Mozilla is just web stuff and they’re still much bigger than the core Python team.

(Mozilla does support a ton of OSS, too, so read that as everyone else needing to step up rather than an attack on them)

[pjmlp]

Google does Tensorflow and V8.

[acdha]

Exactly: V8 benefits almost everyone using JavaScript, TF doesn’t benefit anyone not doing ML with that stack.

All I’m saying is that asking why JS performs faster than Python in some cases is less about the languages and more what you could do with hundreds of engineers working for years. If the stars had aligned differently and that effort had gone into Python (or Ruby, etc.) I’d expect a similar delta.

[pjmlp]

Because those investing into machine learning frameworks in Python rather spend their resources rewriting their libraries in C, C++ and Fortran while calling it "Python".

[wheelerof4te]

Python's ease of calling C libraries is both the blessing and a curse.

My opinion is that it's mostly a curse, since you are hampering the language's evolution and growth for a mere temporary benefit.

Not to mention the horror of distributing compiled libraries, which is one of the biggest reasons why packaging in Python is still such a nightmare.

Making CPython faster by getting rid of the GIL will do wonders for this language and it's community. It will make it much more portable, too. Think of Java-level portability, but in a much nicer package.

[acdha]

Sure, my point was just that the number of corporate investment in the core Python language is smaller. Investing in an ML framework isn’t a bad thing but it doesn’t support anyone working on the core language the way Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. contribute directly to Chromium/WebKit development.

[pjmlp]

Some of those companies overlap both ecosystems.