Why are Interpreted Languages Slow?

Question

I was reading about the pros and cons of interpreted languages, and one of the most common cons is the slowness, but why are programs in interpreted languages slow?

Answer 1

All answers seem to miss the real important point here. It's the detail how "interpreted" code is implemented.

Interpreted script languages are slower because their method, object and global variable space model is dynamic. In my opinion this is the real definition of of script language not the fact that it is interpreted. This requires many extra hash-table lookups on each access to a variable or method call. And its the main reason why they are all terrible at multithreading and using a GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). This lookups is where most of the time is spent. It is a painful random memory lookup, which really hurts when you get a L1/L2 cache-miss.

Google's Javascript Core8 is so fast and targeting almost C speed for a simple optimization: they take the object data model as fixed and create internal code to access it like the data structure of a native compiled program. When a new variable or method is added or removed then the whole compiled code is discarded and compiled again.

The technique is well explained in the Deutsch/Schiffman paper "Efficient Implementation of the Smalltalk-80 System".

The question why php, python and ruby aren't doing this is pretty simple to answer: the technique is extremely complicated to implement.

And only Google has the money to pay for JavaScript because a fast browser-based JavaScript interpreter is their fundamental need of their billion dollar business model.