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This would make sense if all computers ever did was mathematical micro-benchmarks. Can you create a web framework in C that has as many features as Rails or Dj

This would make sense if all computers ever did was mathematical micro-benchmarks. Can you create a web framework in C that has as many features as Rails or Django? And what's the power consumption of that? Higher level languages do more stuff. It's not like Guido and Matz just woke up one day and were like "fuck your CPU". Plus, compilation requires a decent amount of power, as shown in those graphs. Does every C/C++ project run perfectly with no bugs the first time?

quelsolaar 5y ago
Big companies like Facebook and Google do write their web tech in C/C++ because performance and power consumption does matter. If something written in Rails is ten times slower then in C, that means ten times more servers using ten times more power. As I'm sure you can imagine, cutting a zero of these companies server bills is a big deal. You can buy a lot of hours doing manual memory management for that kind of money.
- notacoward 5y ago
  I don't know about Google, but that certainly didn't seem to be the case at Facebook. PHP/Hack was the language of choice for front-end stuff, C++ for most of the code in infra services, and Python holding everything together.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Yes, both are replacing some PHP/Python bits with C++ AFTER scaling to billions of users... Still curious what the power savings are... I'm sure they've done enough profiling to know their performance is increasing. But are they saving energy? How about the compilation cycles to get to where they are? The carbon footprint of the additional employees? Etc...?
  - colanderman 5y ago
    Facebook runs PHP via their own JIT, HHVM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM). Researching a bit now it appears they've actually migrated to their own subset of PHP called Hack, which is measured in the benchmark, and looks more efficient than even some compiled languages in that benchmark.
  - notacoward 5y ago
    > How about the compilation cycles When the code will be deployed on 10K-1M machines, compilation costs are noise. In fact, FB does all sorts of expensive optimizations to ensure that the deployed executables are as efficient as possible, and the effort is worth it many times over. I'm sure the same is true at Google and elsewhere.
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
Matz did actually say pretty much that. https://evrone.com/yukihiro-matsumoto-interview https://evrone.com/yukihiro-matsumoto-interview

quelsolaar 5y ago

Big companies like Facebook and Google do write their web tech in C/C++ because performance and power consumption does matter. If something written in Rails is ten times slower then in C, that means ten times more servers using ten times more power. As I'm sure you can imagine, cutting a zero of these companies server bills is a big deal. You can buy a lot of hours doing manual memory management for that kind of money.

notacoward 5y ago
I don't know about Google, but that certainly didn't seem to be the case at Facebook. PHP/Hack was the language of choice for front-end stuff, C++ for most of the code in infra services, and Python holding everything together.
Mikeb85 5y ago
Yes, both are replacing some PHP/Python bits with C++ AFTER scaling to billions of users... Still curious what the power savings are... I'm sure they've done enough profiling to know their performance is increasing. But are they saving energy? How about the compilation cycles to get to where they are? The carbon footprint of the additional employees? Etc...?
- colanderman 5y ago
  Facebook runs PHP via their own JIT, HHVM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM). Researching a bit now it appears they've actually migrated to their own subset of PHP called Hack, which is measured in the benchmark, and looks more efficient than even some compiled languages in that benchmark.
- notacoward 5y ago
  > How about the compilation cycles When the code will be deployed on 10K-1M machines, compilation costs are noise. In fact, FB does all sorts of expensive optimizations to ensure that the deployed executables are as efficient as possible, and the effort is worth it many times over. I'm sure the same is true at Google and elsewhere.

pwdisswordfish9 5y ago

Matz did actually say pretty much that. https://evrone.com/yukihiro-matsumoto-interview https://evrone.com/yukihiro-matsumoto-interview