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My argument is about the economics of software development more than about any of the large number of interesting technical details we could debate for a very l

My argument is about the economics of software development more than about any of the large number of interesting technical details we could debate for a very long time. There are higher level features that cause higher resource consumption. GC is clearly one such feature. No one denies that. So how do we decide where it makes more sense to use these features and where does it make less sense? What I'm saying is that we should let ourselves be guided by the ratio development_time / running_time. The smaller this ratio, the less sense it makes to use such "resource hogging" features and the more sense it makes to use every opportunity for optimisation. This is not only true for infrastructure/systems software. This is just one case where that ratio is very small. Another case would be application software that is used by a very large number of people, such as web browsers.

titzer 5y ago
I understand your argument, it's been made for decades. Put in a lot of effort to save those resources. But isn't about effort. We put in a lot of effort and still got crap, even worse, security. We put effort into the wrong things! We've majorly screwed up our priorities. Correctness should be so much higher up the priority list, probably #1, TBH. When it is a high priority, we should be willing to sacrifice performance to actually get it. The correct question is not if we should sacrifice performance, but how much. We didn't even get that right. But look, I know. Security doesn't sell systems, never has--benchmarks do. The competitive benchmarking marketplace is partly responsible. And there, there's been so much FUD on the subject that I feel we've all been hoodwinked and conned into putting performance at the top to all of our detriment. That was just dumb on our (collective) part. Let me put it another way. Go back to 1980. Suppose I offered you two choices. Choice A, you get a 1000x improvement in computer performance and memory capacity, but your system software is a major pain in the ass to write and full of security vulnerabilities, to the point where the world suffers hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP due to software vulnerabilities. Choice B, you get an 800x improvement in computer performance, a 500x improvement in memory capacity, and two thirds of that GDP loss just doesn't happen. Also, writing that software isn't nearly as much of a pain in the ass. Which did we choose? Yeah. That's where the disagreement lies.

titzer 5y ago

I understand your argument, it's been made for decades. Put in a lot of effort to save those resources. But isn't about effort. We put in a lot of effort and still got crap, even worse, security. We put effort into the wrong things! We've majorly screwed up our priorities. Correctness should be so much higher up the priority list, probably #1, TBH. When it is a high priority, we should be willing to sacrifice performance to actually get it. The correct question is not if we should sacrifice performance, but how much. We didn't even get that right. But look, I know. Security doesn't sell systems, never has--benchmarks do. The competitive benchmarking marketplace is partly responsible. And there, there's been so much FUD on the subject that I feel we've all been hoodwinked and conned into putting performance at the top to all of our detriment. That was just dumb on our (collective) part. Let me put it another way. Go back to 1980. Suppose I offered you two choices. Choice A, you get a 1000x improvement in computer performance and memory capacity, but your system software is a major pain in the ass to write and full of security vulnerabilities, to the point where the world suffers hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP due to software vulnerabilities. Choice B, you get an 800x improvement in computer performance, a 500x improvement in memory capacity, and two thirds of that GDP loss just doesn't happen. Also, writing that software isn't nearly as much of a pain in the ass. Which did we choose? Yeah. That's where the disagreement lies.