4 ms·

It's funny how it starts out with "immutability is really fast and GCs are soo good" and ends up with "rewriting everything in unmanaged code made it 50x faster

It's funny how it starts out with "immutability is really fast and GCs are soo good" and ends up with "rewriting everything in unmanaged code made it 50x faster". Similar how "Ruby and Python interpreters are slow but webapps are IO bound anyway so it doesn't matter" to "how can I get this to handle more than x req/sec, can we get a JIT to speed up our dog slow backend".

smrtinsert 5y ago
It's almost like one side had the ability to say "we told you so" and they never bothered to :)
aasasd 5y ago
> "Ruby and Python interpreters are slow but webapps are IO bound anyway so it doesn't matter" to "how can I get this to handle more than x req/sec, can we get a JIT to speed up our dog slow backend" Turns out that if you write business logic with abandon, you end up with a lot of business logic. Personally I wish that Python, Ruby and the ilk all get replaced with Lua, but also that Lua gets a proper `null`.
- seniorivn 5y ago
  and array numbering from zero
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    This is why I've never been able to do anything serious with Lua. Small thing, but fatal for me.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    No idea why this bothers people so much. How often are you manually indexing into an array with numeric literals?
gwern 5y ago
One of the arguments high-level language proponents always made was that you could do exploratory programming and prototyping and develop your systems in nice easy high-level languages, and then FFI out or reimplement parts in the painfully low-level languages when you discover you need their performance. asciinema prototyped and worked out their design, and discovered it needed more performance. And then it got it. Sounds like a success story to me.