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by zare_st 938 days ago
There is a version of BASIC, a QuickBasic clone called Qb64 that is lightning fast because it transpiles to C++. By your admission a programmer should think that BASIC is fast because he only does BASIC and does not care about the environment details?

It's actually the opposite, a Python programmer should know how to offload most, or use the libraries that do so, out of Python into C. He should not be oblivious to the fact that any decent Python performance is due to shrinking down the ratio of actual Python instructions vs native instructions.
1 comments
benrutter 937 days ago
I think maybe it's just semantics as long as everyone agrees where the speedup is happening (at the low level language calls).

I noticed that you're pretty hard in the "basic isn't fast, the thing it transpiles to is fast" camp, but still accidentally said "there is a version of BASIC [...] that is lightning fast" which I'm not sure you think? Highlights just how tricky it is to talk about where speed lives

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zare_st 935 days ago
I agree with that.

There is clear distinction between original language design (an interpreter) and a project aiming to recreate a sub-standard of that language and support its legacy codebase via a transpiler.

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