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I work on a code base that is a mixture of Go and C. It's IO, CPU and Memory hungry, and it's distributed. C is fast because it's close to how CPU and memory

I work on a code base that is a mixture of Go and C. It's IO, CPU and Memory hungry, and it's distributed. C is fast because it's close to how CPU and memory actually work. Go gives you 95+% of that plus easy to learn, easy to use language. A new person could start contributing useful features and bug fixes immediately. A senior person could get C-level performance. More and more of our code is moved from C to Go, with very little performance penalty, but with a lot more safety and ease of use. Our customers benefit, and our company makes more money. In the end, that's what software is about.

dist1ll 4y ago
> C is fast because it's close to how CPU and memory actually work. Out-of-order execution, cache hierarchies, branch prediction, virtual memory, pipelining, vector instructions, ILP, NUMA are all pretty transparent to the C spec. Trying to accommodat hardware quirks with C feels like blackbox engineering. It's certainly better than with managed languages but still....
- kosherhurricane 4y ago
  C is an abstraction, and most (all?) cpu architectures pretends to be c machines. I don't know of any other way of manipulating the cpu as closely as C and assembly. Do you?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
YesThatTom2 4y ago
Here’s an article that refutes your claims. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
- kosherhurricane 4y ago
  I know about this article. Thank you. I said C is "close to" how a computer works. C is an abstraction, and most (all?) cpu architectures pretends to be c machines. There was a talk (Kelly?) where even assembly is nowhere close to what a cpu actually does. I don't know of any other way of manipulating the cpu as closely as C and assembly. Do you?
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
I do prefer Go over C in most cases and it's not like there are no pitfalls in C. It is just disappointing when a lang doesn't improve over time and have the same stupid problems year after year.

dist1ll 4y ago

> C is fast because it's close to how CPU and memory actually work. Out-of-order execution, cache hierarchies, branch prediction, virtual memory, pipelining, vector instructions, ILP, NUMA are all pretty transparent to the C spec. Trying to accommodat hardware quirks with C feels like blackbox engineering. It's certainly better than with managed languages but still....

kosherhurricane 4y ago
C is an abstraction, and most (all?) cpu architectures pretends to be c machines. I don't know of any other way of manipulating the cpu as closely as C and assembly. Do you?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

YesThatTom2 4y ago

Here’s an article that refutes your claims. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479

kosherhurricane 4y ago
I know about this article. Thank you. I said C is "close to" how a computer works. C is an abstraction, and most (all?) cpu architectures pretends to be c machines. There was a talk (Kelly?) where even assembly is nowhere close to what a cpu actually does. I don't know of any other way of manipulating the cpu as closely as C and assembly. Do you?

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

I do prefer Go over C in most cases and it's not like there are no pitfalls in C. It is just disappointing when a lang doesn't improve over time and have the same stupid problems year after year.