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> If it really wasn't slow, why would they have to defend it? We don't see "C is not slow" articles. Because there’s a justifiable concern from some about a by
by colejohnson66 5y ago
> If it really wasn't slow, why would they have to defend it? We don't see "C is not slow" articles.
Because there’s a justifiable concern from some about a bytecode system being slower than raw machine code. After all, bytecode requires, at a minimum, interpretation to run. And with JIT systems, there’s still a cost associated with it.
You don’t see “C is not slow” because no one is arguing that it is.[a] There’s nothing faster than machine code[b].
[a]: Maybe back in the day when assembly was still king? If the internet was as prevalent 20 years ago as it is now, I’m sure you’d’ve seen articles arguing “C is not slow” compared to assembly.
[b]: Ignoring optimizations. Machine code is as close to the processor you can get.
- OldTimeCoffee 5y agoYou would see USENET posts back in the 90s about C/C++ vs ASM basically arguing that C/C++ was better than ASM because hand tuning ASM wasn't worth the man-months of effort required to extract the small amount of additional performance. It's basically the same argument, writing in a higher level language provides more benefit than the performance losses that aren't really that big to begin with.