skipped a few steps there i think.

thanks for the considered reply. didn't mean to jump all the way down to electrons and sound so flippant.

my claim is that JavaScript arrays are arrays because the spec defines their behavior as such. the implementation details are absolutely interesting from a performance perspective and I was genuinely curious how an internally linked list implementation would actually work, real-world. regardless... almost every interaction I have ever had with a JS programmer has ended in "its strings all the way down".. so... I mean... yes-ish?

loved your poking of the hornets nest in this thread :-)

That's a different kind of array (Float32Array etc.), not the "normal" kind.

If I'm understanding you correctly, they're basically doing the same thing as Python under the hood and using a heap-allocated array (vector) of pointers? If so, that should still be orders of magnitude faster than a linked list.

If their implementation is actually a linked list, colour me shocked. My impression was that JavaScript is "decently fast". I've never even considered writing high-performance code in it, but I've heard that the compiler can optimise extremely aggressively, and it's used so widely that I couldn't imagine that it had glaring performance issues like what I would expect to see if every array was actually a linked list under the hood.