Interpreted languages: The higher-level the faster?
- by immersion
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?)