4 ms·

It's great to be able to use an expressive language and to go low level and/or verbose to extract every bit of performance on hot code. I have written some amou

by plafl 5y ago

It's great to be able to use an expressive language and to go low level and/or verbose to extract every bit of performance on hot code. I have written some amount of numerical code in C and it's not unusual to first prototype in Matlab, Python or whatever for the productivity gains and rewrite later in C (nowadays I'm using Julia and so far it's great) . That being said, the only way for language X to be faster than C is to not try very hard optimizing the C implementation.

bobthebuilders 5y ago
Not really, FORTRAN is still faster than C for numerical purposes due to array aliasing concerns.
- plafl 5y ago
  AFAIK, not since 1999: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrict https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrict But yes, Fortran can be as fast, although I'm not sure compilers are given the same love as in C
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    Depends about which compiler you are talking. I think there are very specialized Fortran compilers which produce excellent code for scientific applications.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    People hardly ever use restrict. Anyway that's not the only advantage FORTRAN has. It also has native array support.