It blows my mind to see that speed difference between different languages. In even the slowest language there we have lots of ways we could optimize this contrived code but this is not something that we can always do in the real world. Seeing the visualization here really underscores how fast some languages are.

> Seeing the visualization here really underscores how fast some languages are.

Yes and no.

It emphasizes that there are some scenarios where language choice can have an outsized effect on performance when running on modern architectures, which is a reminder some people could use or have never really witnessed.

But it's a very particular scenario that relatively few projects will encounter at a scale that meaningfully impacts them.

In particular, C and Rust are much better positioned to instruction pipelining and lack of cache busting because there are no conditionals and little-to-no out-of-loop code to execute. Even with a massive loop like this, that can be a real world scenario in things like data/signal processing and numerical computation. When you're doing those things, language choice can make a huge difference that may not be apparent without understanding how they work or at least seeing visualizations like this.

But even in C and Rust, most applications don't have to do this kind of thing. Most are dominated by smaller loops, with branching that breaks pipelining, complexity that busts cpu cache, calls and jumps that might interfere with both etc. In those much more common cases, the practical performance difference is going to be quite a lot less significant, and the fluency/ergonomics/safety/convenience of working in some other language can easily matter more.