[aastronaut]

> [...], written in TypeScript and accelerated with C++ bindings to BLAS and LAPACK

C++ addons for Node.js are not part of the JavaScript runtime.

[revskill]

But it still blocks event loop ?

[byteofbits]

Native bindings can use libuv to offboard work to other threads and then re trigger the JS execution when it completes.

This is how a lot of the native node libraries work under the hood to allow parallel IO operations! It’s also an incredibly powerful performance optimisation tool in more complex, scale out NodeJS deployments.

[revskill]

So in theory, if we ported python libraries into JS, the performance could be better than Python ?

[pjmlp]

Python bindings for native libraries would still be the same, they are the same native libraries, while pure Python code would speed up thanks to JavaScript runtimes having JITs.

[byteofbits]

At work we do some pretty significant parallelised computation (using Node and Rust) and that has equivalent performance to a relevant python based library.

There are nuances to how data enters and exits the VM runtime which means I couldn’t say with confidence if performance would be better or worse in the general case - but either direction is at least technically viable.

[NickChasanis]

i was thinking about that, seems like a good deal overall with limited overhead.