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In my experience, whether code like summing integers takes 6 instructions or 600 doesn't influence the speed of 95% of code and 95% of systems. If you could ma

by chubot 10y ago

In my experience, whether code like summing integers takes 6 instructions or 600 doesn't influence the speed of 95% of code and 95% of systems. If you could magically port real Python or ruby or JavaScript code to pixie, but keep the same algorithms and architecture, I doubt it would change much. Slowness is more influenced by things like data structure layout, allocation patterns, serial vs parallel I/O, context switches, and just plain not understanding your code once it reaches a certain size. There seems to be a fetish for JIT compilation in a lot of new language designs and it confuses me. Julia is probably the language making the best and most appropriate use of it. It actually has good data structures and types which complement it.

dinkumthinkum 10y ago
What do you mean in your experience? Summing integers can take two orders of magnitude more time and it doesn't matter? I think it goes without saying in discussions of performance, we narrow our focus to performance sensitive applications and not CRUD database web frontends. I can tell you in the vast majority of performance sensitive numerical applications, that would matter. It would have to be massively disk bound for it to be overshadowed completely by I/O. Just saying. :)
- chubot 10y ago
  I don't follow. Why aren't database web front ends performance sensitive? They seem like one of the slowest things out there, and some of the most widely used. My comments here on Steve Souders' realization is basically what I'm talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13346635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13346635 If you want to make systems fast, you work on the bottleneck. I'm saying that people think too often that summing integers is the bottleneck, when it plainly isn't. Although I have worked in the domain of numerical applications, thus my nod to Julia. Anybody who works in that domain isn't going to be using something like Pixie; it's too impoverished in terms of types and data representation.

by chubot 10y ago

dinkumthinkum 10y ago

What do you mean in your experience? Summing integers can take two orders of magnitude more time and it doesn't matter? I think it goes without saying in discussions of performance, we narrow our focus to performance sensitive applications and not CRUD database web frontends. I can tell you in the vast majority of performance sensitive numerical applications, that would matter. It would have to be massively disk bound for it to be overshadowed completely by I/O. Just saying. :)

chubot 10y ago
I don't follow. Why aren't database web front ends performance sensitive? They seem like one of the slowest things out there, and some of the most widely used. My comments here on Steve Souders' realization is basically what I'm talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13346635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13346635 If you want to make systems fast, you work on the bottleneck. I'm saying that people think too often that summing integers is the bottleneck, when it plainly isn't. Although I have worked in the domain of numerical applications, thus my nod to Julia. Anybody who works in that domain isn't going to be using something like Pixie; it's too impoverished in terms of types and data representation.