Interpreted languages: The higher-level the faster?

Posted by immersion on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by immersion
Published on 2010-05-05T17:43:14Z Indexed on 2010/05/05 17:48 UTC
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interpreter

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Performance

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programming-languages

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language-design

I have designed around 5 experimental languages and interpreters for them so far, for education, as a hobby and for fun.

One thing I noticed: The assembly-like language featuring only subroutines and conditional jumps as structures was much slower than the high-level language featuring if, while and so on. I developed them both simultaneously and both were interpreted languages. I wrote the interpreters in C++ and I tried to optimize the code-execution part to be as fast as possible.

My hypothesis: In almost all cases, performance of interpreted languages rises with their level (high/low).

Am I basically right with this? (If not, why?)

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