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I believe the main issue at play here is a paradox in software engineering. The paradox is this: safe languages are more useful on complex projects that in simp

I believe the main issue at play here is a paradox in software engineering. The paradox is this: safe languages are more useful on complex projects that in simple projects, but complex projects suffer more from performance degradation and system integration issues when these languages are used. Put from the other side, C is perfectly fine to write short pieces of code, but despite its problems it may be the only reasonable language to write large pieces of system software (I'm including C++ here as a "kind of" of C, just like Objective-C).

vmchale 6y ago
> safe languages are more useful on complex projects that in simple projects, but complex projects suffer more from performance degradation I don't think that's true. C is often slower than C++ because of how inlining works, plus some domains (e.g. compilers) it's best to just use a GC language from the get-go.
- iainmerrick 6y ago
  C is often slower than C++ because of how inlining works Hang on, you’re cutting a few corners there! It’s easy to use inline functions in C too. Are you thinking of C++ templates, and the fact that e.g. std::sort is faster than qsort because it directly calls an inlined comparison function rather than a function pointer? That’s true, although it’s possible to achieve similar performance levels in C via hand-rolled data structures or macro hackery. I’ll grant you that the efficient C++ code is more idiomatic and likely safer. On the other hand, idiomatic C code is likely smaller when compiled, which can be important for performance too. I don’t believe “C is often slower than C++” is true in general.
  - jstimpfle 6y ago
    std::sort is the poster child that is supposed to demonstrate the power of C++ templates. When in fact it is awkward to use (as an infrequent user of C++, why can't I never seem to remember how to wrap / make the comparison object?) and more importantly, sort performance is most often completely irrelevant to the performance of a program. And when it's not irrelevant, it's almost 100% certain that std::sort is not the right thing to use. Where it matters, it's probably possible to examine the context a little more closely and come up with a custom sort that runs in O(n) or at least faster than std::sort.
    - cozzyd 6y ago
      Yeah, the real poster-child for C++ performance should be something like Eigen
    - Koshkin 6y ago
      Or, you could just call std::sort and be done with it. (And, oh, by the way, it is faster than qsort - templated code often is.)
      - jstimpfle 6y ago
        You haven't read my comment at all.
    - clappski 6y ago
      Adding custom comparators is trivial with lambdas; std::sort( begin( c ), end( c ), []( const auto& lhs, const auto& rhs ) { /* some comparison impl for the value_type */ } ); Same for everything that take a comparator in <algorithm>

vmchale 6y ago

> safe languages are more useful on complex projects that in simple projects, but complex projects suffer more from performance degradation I don't think that's true. C is often slower than C++ because of how inlining works, plus some domains (e.g. compilers) it's best to just use a GC language from the get-go.

iainmerrick 6y ago
C is often slower than C++ because of how inlining works Hang on, you’re cutting a few corners there! It’s easy to use inline functions in C too. Are you thinking of C++ templates, and the fact that e.g. std::sort is faster than qsort because it directly calls an inlined comparison function rather than a function pointer? That’s true, although it’s possible to achieve similar performance levels in C via hand-rolled data structures or macro hackery. I’ll grant you that the efficient C++ code is more idiomatic and likely safer. On the other hand, idiomatic C code is likely smaller when compiled, which can be important for performance too. I don’t believe “C is often slower than C++” is true in general.
- jstimpfle 6y ago
  std::sort is the poster child that is supposed to demonstrate the power of C++ templates. When in fact it is awkward to use (as an infrequent user of C++, why can't I never seem to remember how to wrap / make the comparison object?) and more importantly, sort performance is most often completely irrelevant to the performance of a program. And when it's not irrelevant, it's almost 100% certain that std::sort is not the right thing to use. Where it matters, it's probably possible to examine the context a little more closely and come up with a custom sort that runs in O(n) or at least faster than std::sort.
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    Yeah, the real poster-child for C++ performance should be something like Eigen
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    Or, you could just call std::sort and be done with it. (And, oh, by the way, it is faster than qsort - templated code often is.)
    - jstimpfle 6y ago
      You haven't read my comment at all.
  - clappski 6y ago
    Adding custom comparators is trivial with lambdas; std::sort( begin( c ), end( c ), []( const auto& lhs, const auto& rhs ) { /* some comparison impl for the value_type */ } ); Same for everything that take a comparator in <algorithm>