[ayhanfuat]

It is not that numpy bypasses public interfaces. It uses documented C APIs. V8, as far as I know, does not have that.

[wk_end]

V8 itself might not, but, say, Node does and that doesn't torpedo performance. Was Node-API just better designed than Python's FFI?

[kccqzy]

My understanding is that Node still doesn’t give you low-level C APIs into the language itself. It gives you JavaScript APIs that call into I/O libraries (libuv basically).

Python it’s not hard to write a module in pure C that manipulates other Python objects. This means the representation of Python objects has to be stable enough for the C code. V8 does not allow that.