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More often than not it is not the language that decides the performance of a system, but the ability of the programmer to come up with sensible designs. This b
by borud 18y ago
More often than not it is not the language that decides the performance of a system, but the ability of the programmer to come up with sensible designs.
This becomes even more important as parallel and computing becomes more important. Designing and implementing systems that run on a single CPU isn't all that hard given all the tools, libraries and abundance of literature developers have access to at little or no cost. Writing software that spans CPUs and even computers is a different matter.
Writing an application like Twitter isn't hard. Making it scale shouldn't be, but apparently still is. Doing twitter in C++ might offset the problems they experience somewhat, but not meaningfully so.
- Tamerlin 18y ago"More often than not it is not the language that decides the performance of a system, but the ability of the programmer to come up with sensible designs." A lot of people forget that. Most of the software I've encountered that displayed performance problems did so because of endemic architectural flaws and bad code. Pointless complexity usually leads to slow software. In most well-written applications, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a version on C++ or a version in Java, because the software is rarely the bottleneck. Obvious exceptions are applications like games and 3D animation systems, where there's a lot of computation going on all the time. A well-written word processor in Ruby might well feel MORE responsive than a poorly written one in C++, for example.