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I've found dropping down to C to be a pain to set up the first time in any language (Ruby, Tcl, etc...) but once you have the tooling, it's just another workflo

I've found dropping down to C to be a pain to set up the first time in any language (Ruby, Tcl, etc...) but once you have the tooling, it's just another workflow. When you think about it, even JavaScript takes a lot of setting up these days (preprocessors, linters, endless debates about why coffeescript is still a good language (hint: it's the existential operator)). But, you amortize the cost of this setup over the lifetime of the project so they are actually quite small. But, it does seem that there are not regular blog posts about how to drop into C to make even the worst scripting language performant. Seems like maybe it's a dying art???

davidw 10y ago
Dropping down to C is pretty cool in a language like Tcl. To toot my own horn, a bit, I worked on those chapters here: http://amzn.to/1U6sFPN http://amzn.to/1U6sFPN Erlang is a bit different though: if you're really concerned about being 'robust' with it, you don't want to link in some random C code in the main node. Not only could it crash, it might simply block for an unacceptable length of time, messing up the system's internal scheduler and making it unresponsive to events. So with Erlang, to do things properly, you need to get the architecture right as well, which makes it that much tricker.