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>Personally, I think the Go community is a little unhealthily obsessed with this particular metric. Let's not forget that Go was invented to solve Google's pro

by vph 11y ago

>Personally, I think the Go community is a little unhealthily obsessed with this particular metric. Let's not forget that Go was invented to solve Google's problems, one of which is it took hours to compile their C,C++ codes. Compile time of Go 1.7, despite the improvement, is still 2x that of Go 1.4.

tptacek 11y ago
At it's slowest point, this compiler took single-digit seconds for its biggest workloads. So: I don't see how Google's C++ compile times are relevant.
pjmlp 11y ago
C was already taking hours to compile in 2000, whereas languages with modules from Algol family would compile just in several minutes. What I find positive about Go is making younger generations that only know C and C++ rediscover the compile times we had in the native compilation during the 90's.
- sievebrain 11y ago
  Yes, in the mid nineties one of Delphi's killer features was super fast compiles. Partly possible due to a single pass compiler but it was just a very fast language to compile. Really, most compiled languages except C++ are fast to compile. In the other thread I pointed out that Java compiles very fast, but nobody in the Go community likes to talk about that, it seems. Actually Java does have multi-tiered compilers, so the frontend is very fast as it doesn't optimise, and then the JIT compiler has a fast-but-low-quality compiler and a slower-but-higher-quality compiler, meaning you get the developer benefits of instant turnaround but the code still gets heavily optimised to GCC/LLVM quality in the hot spots.
  - colin_mccabe 11y ago
    I agree that the Java compiler itself runs fast, but many of the surrounding tools in the Java ecosystem are not fast. For example, Maven takes several minutes to rebuild Hadoop. Based on my experiences, neither Gradle nor ant are that much fast than Maven (although they are a bit faster.) I disagree that "most compiled languages... are fast to compile." Scala is relatively slow to compile (I've seen Spark take over an hour to build). OCaml and SML are none too speedy to compile. Rust's compiler is rather slow (they're going to focus on speeding it up, I have heard.) It seems like most compiled languages that people actually use are slow to compile. Go is a big exception due to its conscious decision to focus on fast compile times. This choice wasn't free-- it involved carefully considering tradeoffs. For example, Go compiles source code files unit-by-unit, forgoing global optimizations in the name of time. The grammar of the language is simpler, in order to enable more efficient parsing. Features like operator overloading are not present. It is trivial to tell what is a function call what is not-- there is no "syntactic sugar" like Ruby's function calls without parens.
    - sievebrain 11y ago
      Hadoop is 2 million lines of code. Yes, that's going to take a few minutes to compile no matter what language it's written in (if it has a compile stage at all). By "most compiled languages" I guess I was thinking of the most popular ones, not literally all compiled languages. Sloppy phrasing, sorry. The top compiled languages according to TIOBE are Java, C, C++, C# (actually these are the top languages in general). Then they're all scripting languages until position 11 which is Delphi. So those are the top 5 and except for C/C++ they compile fast. OCaml, SML, Haskell, Rust etc are all rather rare languages.
      - colin_mccabe 11y ago
        I don't agree that 2 million lines of code is "going to take a few minutes to compile no matter what [compiled] language it's written in." Based on my experiences with Go so far, I believe Go could get that significantly faster, probably under a minute. Also, the "several minutes" number I quoted is also for incremental compiles where only one very small thing has changed, not just for full compiles, which take even longer. TIOBE is a poor measure of programming language popularity for a lot of reasons. But even if we accept that Java, C, C++, and C# are the top languages, I already commented that Java's build is not that fast in the real world (except for very small projects). I don't have any first-hand experience with C#, but I've never heard anyone claim fast compilation is an advantage of that language. C and C++ are slow builders, as we already know. So the top compiled languages are rather slow compilers, which is one reason why scripting languages (I assume you mean non-ahead-of-time-compiled-languages) became popular in the 2000s. This is one part of what Rob Pike was talking about when he said "poorly designed static type systems drive people to dynamic typing."
        incepted 11y ago
        > TIOBE is a poor measure of programming language popularity for a lot of reasons. And yet, it is completely consistent with pretty much all other measurements of programming language popularity (github, job postings, StackOverflow answers, etc...). So maybe it's not that poor a measure after all.
incepted 11y ago
> Let's not forget that Go was invented to solve Google's problems No, it was invented to solve the problem that a handful of Google engineers experienced while writing C++ at Google. Most of Google's code base is written in Java and as such, doesn't suffer from slow compilations.

by vph 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago

At it's slowest point, this compiler took single-digit seconds for its biggest workloads. So: I don't see how Google's C++ compile times are relevant.

pjmlp 11y ago

C was already taking hours to compile in 2000, whereas languages with modules from Algol family would compile just in several minutes. What I find positive about Go is making younger generations that only know C and C++ rediscover the compile times we had in the native compilation during the 90's.

sievebrain 11y ago
Yes, in the mid nineties one of Delphi's killer features was super fast compiles. Partly possible due to a single pass compiler but it was just a very fast language to compile. Really, most compiled languages except C++ are fast to compile. In the other thread I pointed out that Java compiles very fast, but nobody in the Go community likes to talk about that, it seems. Actually Java does have multi-tiered compilers, so the frontend is very fast as it doesn't optimise, and then the JIT compiler has a fast-but-low-quality compiler and a slower-but-higher-quality compiler, meaning you get the developer benefits of instant turnaround but the code still gets heavily optimised to GCC/LLVM quality in the hot spots.
- colin_mccabe 11y ago
  I agree that the Java compiler itself runs fast, but many of the surrounding tools in the Java ecosystem are not fast. For example, Maven takes several minutes to rebuild Hadoop. Based on my experiences, neither Gradle nor ant are that much fast than Maven (although they are a bit faster.) I disagree that "most compiled languages... are fast to compile." Scala is relatively slow to compile (I've seen Spark take over an hour to build). OCaml and SML are none too speedy to compile. Rust's compiler is rather slow (they're going to focus on speeding it up, I have heard.) It seems like most compiled languages that people actually use are slow to compile. Go is a big exception due to its conscious decision to focus on fast compile times. This choice wasn't free-- it involved carefully considering tradeoffs. For example, Go compiles source code files unit-by-unit, forgoing global optimizations in the name of time. The grammar of the language is simpler, in order to enable more efficient parsing. Features like operator overloading are not present. It is trivial to tell what is a function call what is not-- there is no "syntactic sugar" like Ruby's function calls without parens.
  - sievebrain 11y ago
    Hadoop is 2 million lines of code. Yes, that's going to take a few minutes to compile no matter what language it's written in (if it has a compile stage at all). By "most compiled languages" I guess I was thinking of the most popular ones, not literally all compiled languages. Sloppy phrasing, sorry. The top compiled languages according to TIOBE are Java, C, C++, C# (actually these are the top languages in general). Then they're all scripting languages until position 11 which is Delphi. So those are the top 5 and except for C/C++ they compile fast. OCaml, SML, Haskell, Rust etc are all rather rare languages.
    - colin_mccabe 11y ago
      I don't agree that 2 million lines of code is "going to take a few minutes to compile no matter what [compiled] language it's written in." Based on my experiences with Go so far, I believe Go could get that significantly faster, probably under a minute. Also, the "several minutes" number I quoted is also for incremental compiles where only one very small thing has changed, not just for full compiles, which take even longer. TIOBE is a poor measure of programming language popularity for a lot of reasons. But even if we accept that Java, C, C++, and C# are the top languages, I already commented that Java's build is not that fast in the real world (except for very small projects). I don't have any first-hand experience with C#, but I've never heard anyone claim fast compilation is an advantage of that language. C and C++ are slow builders, as we already know. So the top compiled languages are rather slow compilers, which is one reason why scripting languages (I assume you mean non-ahead-of-time-compiled-languages) became popular in the 2000s. This is one part of what Rob Pike was talking about when he said "poorly designed static type systems drive people to dynamic typing."
      - incepted 11y ago
        > TIOBE is a poor measure of programming language popularity for a lot of reasons. And yet, it is completely consistent with pretty much all other measurements of programming language popularity (github, job postings, StackOverflow answers, etc...). So maybe it's not that poor a measure after all.

incepted 11y ago

> Let's not forget that Go was invented to solve Google's problems No, it was invented to solve the problem that a handful of Google engineers experienced while writing C++ at Google. Most of Google's code base is written in Java and as such, doesn't suffer from slow compilations.