title: Performance of bitwise operators in javascript
body: <p>One of the main ideas behind using bitwise operators in languages like C++/java/C# is that they're extremely fast. But I've heard that in javascript they're very slow (admittedly a few milliseconds probably doesn't matter much today). Why is this so?</p>
  
  <p>(<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/654057/where-would-i-use-a-bitwise-operator-in-javascript">this question</a> discusses when bitwise operators are used, so I'm changing the focus of this question to performance.)</p>