It's plenty fast compared to commonly used languages such as JS, PHP or Python, but can easily be let in the dust by Java and C#, which arguably play in the same court.
And AOT-compiled, no GC languages like C++, Rust or Zig just run circles around it.
> You are comparing quality of implementation, not languages.
But comparing languages in a vacuum has 0 value. Maybe some alien entity will use physic transcending time and space to make TCL the fastest language ever, but right now I won't be writing heavy data-processing code in it.
At the same time, comparing without acknowledging that it is an implemenation issue, it is also not being fully honest.
For example, comparing languages with LLVM based implementations, usually if the machine code isn't the same, reveals that they aren't pushing the same LLVM IR down the pipe, and has little value for what the grammar actually looks like.
> comparing without acknowledging that it is an implemenation issue
Because that's implicit at this point – I'm not going to prefix with “because Earth geometry is approximately Euclidian at our scale” every time I'm telling a tourist to go straight ahead for 300m to their bus station.
Just like when people say “C++ is fast”, of course they refer to clang/g++/msvc, not some educational university compiler.
It's plenty fast compared to commonly used languages such as JS, PHP or Python, but can easily be let in the dust by Java and C#, which arguably play in the same court.
And AOT-compiled, no GC languages like C++, Rust or Zig just run circles around it.