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[Languages like Rust] do help you to write more features with fewer bugs, but they are not of much help when you need to squeeze the very last flop from the har

by lacker 4y ago

[Languages like Rust] do help you to write more features with fewer bugs, but they are not of much help when you need to squeeze the very last flop from the hardware you rent. I do think that Rust helps you squeeze out that last 1% of performance over C++. Because instead of spending all day finding that one line of code where an unsafe threaded memory access leads to a race condition bug, I can spend more time performance profiling and optimizing the hot spots.

politician 4y ago
Compared to Spiral, though? I’d prefer ‘automatically finding the optimal solution for a target architecture’ to ‘spending my time performance profiling’ with Rust.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  Does Spiral have a competitive ecosystem? Raw performance is useful but when you build, as the article suggests, a cloud service you need more than fast calculations. Also I'm not sure how the article author thinks Python libraries & tools can beat C++ but disregards other languages for not achieving the same (or better) out of the box. If Python can be made to compete with C++ any language can, and almost any other language is more preferrable to me than Python when it comes to production code.
rapsey 4y ago
Yeah I guess OP never heard of the Rust based components in Firefox.
katmannthree 4y ago
Beyond that, this article is just a little bit absurd. Say what you will about Rust but it's a functional and gradually maturing ecosystem powering more and more things as time goes by. Given that it's sorta-kinda intended to build the kind of things C++ does, the idea that it'll eventually overtake C++ is at least plausible. In comparison this article claims that 1) A cool research language packaged into a VS Code plugin 2) A cool research compiler for Python + numpy 3) A cool generic ISA project will kill C++? Maybe for the author's _very_ specific use case of blindly copying things from SymPy, but really I think you'd have better odds betting on a D resurgence.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  > 3) A cool generic ISA project I wish we had an ISA with non-linear, two-level memory space, so you can have non-overlapping arrays for free (well, as free as virtual memory required to support that would be free): that would mean that e.g. realloc() will never have to call memmove(), range checks are inescapable since they're baked into hardware, etc. But implementing (and using) C on such an ISA will be deeply unpleasant, so it will just die because if something doesn't run C efficiently... it won't be used.
  - j16sdiz 4y ago
    You still need something to identify which memory space the array is from. Unless you are talking about some form of hardware copy-on-write, this is no better than what we have today
drewcoo 4y ago
Similar arguments apply to Java, which can kick C++s butt if the process is long-lived. I was going to drop a link to back that up and was shocked to find it in the bible: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/05/26/when-is-java-faster-than-c/?sh=4c1bfca13100 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/05/26/when-is-java-f...

by lacker 4y ago

politician 4y ago

Compared to Spiral, though? I’d prefer ‘automatically finding the optimal solution for a target architecture’ to ‘spending my time performance profiling’ with Rust.

alpaca128 4y ago
Does Spiral have a competitive ecosystem? Raw performance is useful but when you build, as the article suggests, a cloud service you need more than fast calculations. Also I'm not sure how the article author thinks Python libraries & tools can beat C++ but disregards other languages for not achieving the same (or better) out of the box. If Python can be made to compete with C++ any language can, and almost any other language is more preferrable to me than Python when it comes to production code.

rapsey 4y ago

Yeah I guess OP never heard of the Rust based components in Firefox.

katmannthree 4y ago

Beyond that, this article is just a little bit absurd. Say what you will about Rust but it's a functional and gradually maturing ecosystem powering more and more things as time goes by. Given that it's sorta-kinda intended to build the kind of things C++ does, the idea that it'll eventually overtake C++ is at least plausible. In comparison this article claims that 1) A cool research language packaged into a VS Code plugin 2) A cool research compiler for Python + numpy 3) A cool generic ISA project will kill C++? Maybe for the author's _very_ specific use case of blindly copying things from SymPy, but really I think you'd have better odds betting on a D resurgence.

Joker_vD 4y ago
> 3) A cool generic ISA project I wish we had an ISA with non-linear, two-level memory space, so you can have non-overlapping arrays for free (well, as free as virtual memory required to support that would be free): that would mean that e.g. realloc() will never have to call memmove(), range checks are inescapable since they're baked into hardware, etc. But implementing (and using) C on such an ISA will be deeply unpleasant, so it will just die because if something doesn't run C efficiently... it won't be used.
- j16sdiz 4y ago
  You still need something to identify which memory space the array is from. Unless you are talking about some form of hardware copy-on-write, this is no better than what we have today

drewcoo 4y ago

Similar arguments apply to Java, which can kick C++s butt if the process is long-lived. I was going to drop a link to back that up and was shocked to find it in the bible: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/05/26/when-is-java-faster-than-c/?sh=4c1bfca13100 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/05/26/when-is-java-f...