3 ms·
Much of that (potential) compilation speed is due to Wirth's personality, but his circumstances also helped. For industrial languages, programs will be compile
by 082349872349872 2y ago
Much of that (potential) compilation speed is due to Wirth's personality, but his circumstances also helped.
For industrial languages, programs will be compiled a few times while developing and debugging, and then run many, many more times in production.
For a teaching language, programs will be compiled more than a few times while learning and debugging, and then run never.
This situation has the corollary that teaching languages ought almost always to opt in favour of compilation speed over speed of compiled code.
(when I started programming, developers shared a minicomputer CPU, which meant that even with Unix, which prioritises editor threads over compiler threads, ends of quarters were brutal for load average and hence system responsiveness)
- romwell 2y agoYou say this as if fast compilation speed somehow means bad performance. This is a false dichotomy. Pascal compiles fast and runs fast. Then there's the fact that performance of a program depends on far more things than the language it's written in — and faster iteration cycles ease optimization and profiling on the level of algorithms, which is where you have most gains. Squeezing that potential 3% speed up from using another language is rarely worth it then.