Recently, I came across Julia, a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing. The language itself is interesting, but on the Julia website is are comparative language performance benchmark results. Julia is compared against several other common scientific computing languages, such as, Python, Matlab, R, etc.
The following micro-benchmark results are from a MacBook Pro with a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 8GB of 1066MHz DDR3 RAM
(Figure from julialang.org)
While the performance benchmarks are touting the advantages of the Julia language, I found it most striking the JavaScript performance. It was a surprise to me that JavaScript mostly outperforms Python by an order of magnitude. I knew the optimizations Google and Apple were performing made dramatic improvements, but putting it into this perspective is very impressive. It would have more interesting if they had included Java in the benchmark as well.
I guess I see why node.js has been getting lots of attention for server side processing.