A philosophical question...

Comparing the performance of one language to another is tricky since it's always apples to oranges. Things easy in one language are hard in another. NodeBox does some things with ease that are almost impossible in other languages.

But I don't think of it as being dazzlingly fast. It seems slower in general than other languages I've worked with, even browser-based scripting languages like processing.js. It certainly bogs down when dealing with larger projects.

Is that because, by its very nature, NodeBox could never compete with, say, Javascript? Or is it because our implementation of NodeBox was never optimized for maximum performance? If the latter, how much faster could it be?

I am not an expert in these matters, but it seems to me that, as a functional language, NodeBox has the potential to be much faster for many problems than imperative languages. I would think that imperative languages would be harder to compile into true multi-threaded code that could leverage multiple CPUs. NodeBox, by its nature, should allow more parallelism. Is this a hardware limitation of current (2017) desktop/laptop computers? Could NodeBox set records if it ran on custom hardware?

I am really out of my depth here, which is why I am asking.

Thoughts?

John