3 ms·
Is it just me, or does it look like the typical example of short term hack that will blow up in your face pretty quickly, and turn your life in a constant strea
by bsaul 10y ago
Is it just me, or does it look like the typical example of short term hack that will blow up in your face pretty quickly, and turn your life in a constant stream of low-level tinkering ?
I suppose people at instagram didn't just stop there, but are also planning for more long term solution to optimizing their stack ( aka migration to a more performant language).
- yeukhon 10y agoI would say it didn't start out as a goal to optimize based on the article. The engineer noticed something strange and was very interested in learning why and try to optimize at the same time. This sounds like a fun place to work at.
- topspin 10y ago> turn your life in a constant stream of low-level tinkering It appears to me this is the fate of anyone that has to make garbage collection scale. [1] I guess it's all worth it; build fast, win big and then struggle with the GC as an exercise in technical debt once you can afford enough staff to focus on the problem. Dreary. The insight that due to reference counting GC turns reads into writes is interesting; I think I've encountered that before but can't remember where. As the gap between CPU throughput and RAM latency grows this becomes an ever greater point of pain. > aka migration to a more performant language That happens occasionally with small systems, and it usually works. But big operations with complex code bases don't do that very often. Facebook has re-implemented PHP at least twice now to improve run time performance without changing their language. Just one anecdote in a long list of heroic anecdotes about those who will do any number of backflips and somersaults to avoid replacing their chosen language. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12043271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12043271