3 ms·

Nowadays, it doesn't provide any performance gain. I didn't see those days but maybe it was important for performance back in 70s/80s/90s even it was risky? e.g

Nowadays, it doesn't provide any performance gain. I didn't see those days but maybe it was important for performance back in 70s/80s/90s even it was risky? e.g null terminated string was chosen due to low space overhead.

creato 6y ago
It depends on what you are doing. For some kinds of programs, C/C++ are going to be much faster than most "modern" languages.
- tammerk 6y ago
  I didn't mean C is not fast or not faster than other languages. It's still the fastest one I believe. What I meant is undefined behaviors allow compilers to optimize in a way that would not be possible otherwise. So, it might be a deliberate decision back then, to leverage performance. I don't know, just an idea.
  - jjgreen 6y ago
    It used to be "folk knowledge" that only Fortran and hand-crafted ASM were faster. Not sure if that's still (or ever was) true.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - hajile 6y ago
      I guess it was maybe true one time. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
    - tammerk 6y ago
      I agree but I didn't consider these while saying C is the fastest. These are not "general purpose", like you don't write your db, browser, http server or game engine with these.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Most, but not all. Languages like Rust and Zig show that you can have the performance without the landmines.
  - hajile 6y ago
    Also, theoretical performance is overrated. Almost all the things that lends themselves to speed make code brittle and incapable of future modification. Once you’ve got your C code doing safety checks with data types that won’t break under the littlest change, the code becomes much slower than code golf would suggest. A common example is passing void pointers everywhere. You either check every call every time (aka dynamic typing) or rush everything on the idea that the programmer understands the system completely and never forgets or messes up. Better types give you all the speed AND all the safety here.

creato 6y ago

It depends on what you are doing. For some kinds of programs, C/C++ are going to be much faster than most "modern" languages.

tammerk 6y ago
I didn't mean C is not fast or not faster than other languages. It's still the fastest one I believe. What I meant is undefined behaviors allow compilers to optimize in a way that would not be possible otherwise. So, it might be a deliberate decision back then, to leverage performance. I don't know, just an idea.
- jjgreen 6y ago
  It used to be "folk knowledge" that only Fortran and hand-crafted ASM were faster. Not sure if that's still (or ever was) true.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hajile 6y ago
    I guess it was maybe true one time. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
  - tammerk 6y ago
    I agree but I didn't consider these while saying C is the fastest. These are not "general purpose", like you don't write your db, browser, http server or game engine with these.
nicoburns 6y ago
Most, but not all. Languages like Rust and Zig show that you can have the performance without the landmines.
- hajile 6y ago
  Also, theoretical performance is overrated. Almost all the things that lends themselves to speed make code brittle and incapable of future modification. Once you’ve got your C code doing safety checks with data types that won’t break under the littlest change, the code becomes much slower than code golf would suggest. A common example is passing void pointers everywhere. You either check every call every time (aka dynamic typing) or rush everything on the idea that the programmer understands the system completely and never forgets or messes up. Better types give you all the speed AND all the safety here.