5 ms·

I've always liked the idea of using "systems" languages for data shuffling, because of the ability in some cases to stretch hardware several orders of magnitude

I've always liked the idea of using "systems" languages for data shuffling, because of the ability in some cases to stretch hardware several orders of magnitude further. I read this a while ago and just dug it up: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=95 http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=95 It's a bit silly, but I do think that Rust could be a very good solution here. For one thing, in my experience it is much easier to write than C++, especially for something you'd feel comfortable pointing at users. It would be cool to see some articles that are the reverse of "scale all the things," something like "sympathize with all the caches."

Rusky 11y ago
A blog I've really enjoyed on that subject is Mechanical Sympathy: http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/ http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  First thing I see is an encoder and list of good design rules. This blog could be a gold mine if other articles are similar. Thanks for the link.
- ddorian43 11y ago
  Also the forum https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy
sitkack 11y ago
People often talk about scaling in a lopsided manner. Meaning scaling is only up, well scaling works both directions. For an architecture or runtime to be scalable, it needs to shrink as the demands placed on it fall. Scalability works in both directions.
- lmm 11y ago
  Yes and no. Realistically you often have other constraints. E.g. for a lot of code I wrote at my last^2 job there would be no value in scaling below a single micro EC2 instance (I ran each service on its own instance and got value out of doing so), and almost all languages can scale down that far.
adrianN 11y ago
Writing a web server from scratch in an unsafe language seems like an invitation to get hacked to me. So maybe in Rust this would make sense, but C++ is a dangerous proposition, I think.

Rusky 11y ago

A blog I've really enjoyed on that subject is Mechanical Sympathy: http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/ http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/

nickpsecurity 11y ago
First thing I see is an encoder and list of good design rules. This blog could be a gold mine if other articles are similar. Thanks for the link.
ddorian43 11y ago
Also the forum https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy

sitkack 11y ago

People often talk about scaling in a lopsided manner. Meaning scaling is only up, well scaling works both directions. For an architecture or runtime to be scalable, it needs to shrink as the demands placed on it fall. Scalability works in both directions.

lmm 11y ago
Yes and no. Realistically you often have other constraints. E.g. for a lot of code I wrote at my last^2 job there would be no value in scaling below a single micro EC2 instance (I ran each service on its own instance and got value out of doing so), and almost all languages can scale down that far.

adrianN 11y ago

Writing a web server from scratch in an unsafe language seems like an invitation to get hacked to me. So maybe in Rust this would make sense, but C++ is a dangerous proposition, I think.