3 ms·

OCaml has an unusual share of latency-sensitive stakeholders, probably only comparable with Go of all garbage-collected languages. As far as I heard, optimizing

by owl57 7y ago

OCaml has an unusual share of latency-sensitive stakeholders, probably only comparable with Go of all garbage-collected languages. As far as I heard, optimizing Go's GC for latency has been an awful lot of work.

dan-robertson 7y ago
Any reasonably widely used language will have users who care about latency. People write user interfaces in Java so clearly it’s users care about latency. Similarly for JavaScript except I would expect a react user interface to produce a lot more allocation pressure than a java one (and so gc latency and throughput both matter). Even emacs lisp cares about latency (the main user visible improvement was not printing “garbage collected” each time the gc ran). For things like servers, latency can matter to some extent because of the resource usage of in-flight requests. It is desirable to serve requests quickly to free up resources on the server and any clients too. Similarly one will find plenty of apps which care about throughput too.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  > Any reasonably widely used language will have users who care about latency. Right, but, to the parent's point, OCaml, with its HFT pedigree, has an unusual level of latency sensitivity in its userbase. I can't speak for Jane Street, but, at the prop shop where I did my time, nobody found it all that peculiar to have major cross-company initiatives to, e.g., shave a couple bytes off a datagram format just to reduce some message's average latency by a fraction of a millisecond.
- lmm 7y ago
  > People write user interfaces in Java so clearly it’s users care about latency. GUIs in Java are notoriously bad, and tend to only be used for internal tools (where good UX is not a priority), complex professional tools where functionality was a higher priority than UX, or open-source programs where the same thing is true. Another example is that Java is still an unpopular language for command-line tools that can be used from the shell, whereas OCaml is pretty popular in that use space. Any reasonably popular language will have someone using it for any given thing, sure - I'm sure there are people out there writing webapp backends in C or numerical batch processes in Ruby - but the core constituency can differ a lot between different languages, and that can (and should!) affect that language's priorities.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Programmer art ,doing everything on the UI thread, and not caring to read books like "Filthy Rich Client" usually are big contributors to that bad experience. And there is hardly any difference between using something like Swing Material UI widgets or the typical Android app, other than programmer skills.

by owl57 7y ago

dan-robertson 7y ago

Any reasonably widely used language will have users who care about latency. People write user interfaces in Java so clearly it’s users care about latency. Similarly for JavaScript except I would expect a react user interface to produce a lot more allocation pressure than a java one (and so gc latency and throughput both matter). Even emacs lisp cares about latency (the main user visible improvement was not printing “garbage collected” each time the gc ran). For things like servers, latency can matter to some extent because of the resource usage of in-flight requests. It is desirable to serve requests quickly to free up resources on the server and any clients too. Similarly one will find plenty of apps which care about throughput too.

mumblemumble 7y ago
> Any reasonably widely used language will have users who care about latency. Right, but, to the parent's point, OCaml, with its HFT pedigree, has an unusual level of latency sensitivity in its userbase. I can't speak for Jane Street, but, at the prop shop where I did my time, nobody found it all that peculiar to have major cross-company initiatives to, e.g., shave a couple bytes off a datagram format just to reduce some message's average latency by a fraction of a millisecond.
lmm 7y ago
> People write user interfaces in Java so clearly it’s users care about latency. GUIs in Java are notoriously bad, and tend to only be used for internal tools (where good UX is not a priority), complex professional tools where functionality was a higher priority than UX, or open-source programs where the same thing is true. Another example is that Java is still an unpopular language for command-line tools that can be used from the shell, whereas OCaml is pretty popular in that use space. Any reasonably popular language will have someone using it for any given thing, sure - I'm sure there are people out there writing webapp backends in C or numerical batch processes in Ruby - but the core constituency can differ a lot between different languages, and that can (and should!) affect that language's priorities.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Programmer art ,doing everything on the UI thread, and not caring to read books like "Filthy Rich Client" usually are big contributors to that bad experience. And there is hardly any difference between using something like Swing Material UI widgets or the typical Android app, other than programmer skills.