4 ms·

At system scale, a 1% loss is a huge deal. Perf teams on operating systems do things for systemwide performance with small percentage wins all the time. Whether

At system scale, a 1% loss is a huge deal. Perf teams on operating systems do things for systemwide performance with small percentage wins all the time. Whether this is the right trade off for D, whether it’s feasible to flip a global switch for “slower code but optimal GC” or whether it’s an intractable problem I can’t say, but Walter is correct on this point.

dwaite 4y ago
It is contextual. The things like system IPC where 1% would be huge are also typically not written in C, but in a mix of C and assembly. But writing at that level of specificity for an entire system greatly increases creation and maintenance time costs. You may lose the opportunity to make future performance improvements as a result.
diffxx 4y ago
> Perf teams on operating systems do things for systemwide performance with small percentage wins all the time. And they evidently spend very little time on the things that would actually improve the lives of their users in macroscopic ways. The fact that our dominant model of an operating system is essentially c + shell is a tragedy. The operating system does almost nothing for us to help write fast, correct programs in a reasonable amount of time. It is of course for this reason that unix itself has barely improved in a material way in 30 years except in these kinds of microbenchmarks. Third party tooling and languages have of course improved, but largely to cover the gaps that the operating system has largely failed to address in a meaningful way.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > The operating system does almost nothing for us to help write fast, correct programs in a reasonable amount of time. Um, when the PC computers switched from real mode to protected mode operating systems, that was an enormous boost to programming. It's hard to understate it.

4 ms·

At system scale, a 1% loss is a huge deal. Perf teams on operating systems do things for systemwide performance with small percentage wins all the time. Whether

by KerrAvon 4y ago

dwaite 4y ago
It is contextual. The things like system IPC where 1% would be huge are also typically not written in C, but in a mix of C and assembly. But writing at that level of specificity for an entire system greatly increases creation and maintenance time costs. You may lose the opportunity to make future performance improvements as a result.
diffxx 4y ago
> Perf teams on operating systems do things for systemwide performance with small percentage wins all the time. And they evidently spend very little time on the things that would actually improve the lives of their users in macroscopic ways. The fact that our dominant model of an operating system is essentially c + shell is a tragedy. The operating system does almost nothing for us to help write fast, correct programs in a reasonable amount of time. It is of course for this reason that unix itself has barely improved in a material way in 30 years except in these kinds of microbenchmarks. Third party tooling and languages have of course improved, but largely to cover the gaps that the operating system has largely failed to address in a meaningful way.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > The operating system does almost nothing for us to help write fast, correct programs in a reasonable amount of time. Um, when the PC computers switched from real mode to protected mode operating systems, that was an enormous boost to programming. It's hard to understate it.