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Nice. My reply would have been something like: it combines the performance of Lisp with the productivity of C++. These days Java the language is much better tho

Nice. My reply would have been something like: it combines the performance of Lisp with the productivity of C++. These days Java the language is much better though, thanks to Brian Goetz.

shakow 3y ago
> it combines the performance of Lisp with the productivity of C++ Is that supposed to be a jab? Because IME SBCL Lisp is in the same ballpark as Go (albeit offering a fully interactive development environment), and C++ is far from being the worst choice when it comes down to productivity.
- grumpyprole 3y ago
  Hopefully you agree Lisp is more productive than C++? Lisp is however not quite fast or efficient enough to displace C++ completely, mainly because, like Java and Go, it has a garbage collector. C++ was very much the language in Java's crosshairs. Java made programming a bit safer, nulls and threads not withstanding, but was certainly not as productive as Lisp. Meanwhile Lisp evolved into Haskell and OCaml, two very productive languages which thankfully are inspiring everyone else to improve. Phil Wadler (from the original Haskell committee) has even been helping the Go team.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Common Lisp, is also among the GC based languages that offer mechanisms to do GC free allocations and has value types. The only reason is the AI winter, and companies moving away from Lisp.
  - shakow 3y ago
    I agree; my point is simply that C++ is still OK-ish w.r.t. productivity, and Lisp is OK when it comes down to performances.
didntcheck 3y ago
The performance of the JVM was definitely a fair criticism in it's early years, and still is when writing performance-critical applications like databases, but it's still possibly the fastest managed runtime around, and is often only a margin slower than native code on hot paths. It seems the reputation has stuck though, to the point that I've seen young programmers make stock jokes about Java being slow when their proposed alternative is Python
- kaba0 3y ago
  Just for an example: on the recent 1billion rows challenge, the top java contender takes only 2x as much time as a SIMD-optimized C one.
  - grumpyprole 3y ago
    Yes it's possible to write Java without any boxing of primitives or garbage collection, but one can't use any of the standard libraries and it's not really Java one is writing but a very restricted subset. I don't think these benchmark are particularly indicative of real world performance. But of course Java is still hundreds (thousands?) of times faster than Python.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      It’s okay to do some allocations - it can be stack replaced, and even if it’s not, the cost is very negligible. The problem is mindless allocation, not allocation itself.

Nice. My reply would have been something like: it combines the performance of Lisp with the productivity of C++. These days Java the language is much better though, thanks to Brian Goetz.

shakow 3y ago

> it combines the performance of Lisp with the productivity of C++ Is that supposed to be a jab? Because IME SBCL Lisp is in the same ballpark as Go (albeit offering a fully interactive development environment), and C++ is far from being the worst choice when it comes down to productivity.

grumpyprole 3y ago
Hopefully you agree Lisp is more productive than C++? Lisp is however not quite fast or efficient enough to displace C++ completely, mainly because, like Java and Go, it has a garbage collector. C++ was very much the language in Java's crosshairs. Java made programming a bit safer, nulls and threads not withstanding, but was certainly not as productive as Lisp. Meanwhile Lisp evolved into Haskell and OCaml, two very productive languages which thankfully are inspiring everyone else to improve. Phil Wadler (from the original Haskell committee) has even been helping the Go team.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Common Lisp, is also among the GC based languages that offer mechanisms to do GC free allocations and has value types. The only reason is the AI winter, and companies moving away from Lisp.
- shakow 3y ago
  I agree; my point is simply that C++ is still OK-ish w.r.t. productivity, and Lisp is OK when it comes down to performances.

didntcheck 3y ago

The performance of the JVM was definitely a fair criticism in it's early years, and still is when writing performance-critical applications like databases, but it's still possibly the fastest managed runtime around, and is often only a margin slower than native code on hot paths. It seems the reputation has stuck though, to the point that I've seen young programmers make stock jokes about Java being slow when their proposed alternative is Python

kaba0 3y ago
Just for an example: on the recent 1billion rows challenge, the top java contender takes only 2x as much time as a SIMD-optimized C one.
- grumpyprole 3y ago
  Yes it's possible to write Java without any boxing of primitives or garbage collection, but one can't use any of the standard libraries and it's not really Java one is writing but a very restricted subset. I don't think these benchmark are particularly indicative of real world performance. But of course Java is still hundreds (thousands?) of times faster than Python.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    It’s okay to do some allocations - it can be stack replaced, and even if it’s not, the cost is very negligible. The problem is mindless allocation, not allocation itself.