Rust is obviously fast. C’s performance is second-to-none. Assembly is probably even faster. But I’ve also heard Node.js described as fast too, while others say none of this even matters because I/O.

Can all these claims be true?

Benchmarks try to measure the performance of a bit of code in isolation. Using them in JavaScript can have some pretty misleading results.

To see why, let’s take a closer look at how JavaScript engines work.