3 ms·

That's not what the "sufficiently smart compiler" is. The "sufficiently smart compiler" is one that allows you to write any amazingly capable language you want

by jerf 2y ago

That's not what the "sufficiently smart compiler" is. The "sufficiently smart compiler" is one that allows you to write any amazingly capable language you want with whatever amazing semantics you want, and it compiles it into code that is competitive with C written for speed. You can easily observe in any cross-language shootout in 2024 that optimized code bases in the various languages still have gradients and we do not live in a world where you can just start slamming out Python code and expect no performance delta against C. https://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html Merely smart compilers are amazing; one of the defining characteristics of the software world is that you can be handed these things for free. The "sufficiently smart compiler", however, does not exist, and while there is no mathematical proof that I'm aware of that they are impossible, after at least two decades of people trying to produce them and totally failing, the rational expectation at this point must be that they do not exist.

lmm 2y ago
> You can easily observe in any cross-language shootout in 2024 that optimized code bases in the various languages still have gradients and we do not live in a world where you can just start slamming out Python code and expect no performance delta against C. Microbenchmarks may show an advantage for C - but it's one that is shrinking all the time (and that goes doubly for Java, which was the go-to example in the original "sufficiently smart compiler" conversations - but no longer is, because you can't actually be confident that Java is going to perform worse than C any more). And the overwhelming majority of the time, for real-world business problems, people do just start slamming out Python code, and if anything it tends to perform better. And conversely even those C programs now rely extremely heavily on compiler smartness to reorder instructions, autovectorise, etc., often producing something quite radically different from what a naive reading of the code would mean - and there is no real appetite for a language that doesn't do this, one with semantics designed to perform well on today's CPUs or GPUs. Which suggests that designing the language semantics for performance is not actually particularly important.
- jerf 2y ago
  If you honestly believe that Python is already, right now, in practice, as fast as C on all tasks and nobody need to even consider the matter of performance because the Sufficiently Smart Compiler is already a reality that we can count on, you and I are too far apart to ever come to any agreement on this matter. Best of luck in your engineering endeavors if you ever end up in a place you need high performance code. You're going to need a lot of it.

by jerf 2y ago

lmm 2y ago

> You can easily observe in any cross-language shootout in 2024 that optimized code bases in the various languages still have gradients and we do not live in a world where you can just start slamming out Python code and expect no performance delta against C. Microbenchmarks may show an advantage for C - but it's one that is shrinking all the time (and that goes doubly for Java, which was the go-to example in the original "sufficiently smart compiler" conversations - but no longer is, because you can't actually be confident that Java is going to perform worse than C any more). And the overwhelming majority of the time, for real-world business problems, people do just start slamming out Python code, and if anything it tends to perform better. And conversely even those C programs now rely extremely heavily on compiler smartness to reorder instructions, autovectorise, etc., often producing something quite radically different from what a naive reading of the code would mean - and there is no real appetite for a language that doesn't do this, one with semantics designed to perform well on today's CPUs or GPUs. Which suggests that designing the language semantics for performance is not actually particularly important.

jerf 2y ago
If you honestly believe that Python is already, right now, in practice, as fast as C on all tasks and nobody need to even consider the matter of performance because the Sufficiently Smart Compiler is already a reality that we can count on, you and I are too far apart to ever come to any agreement on this matter. Best of luck in your engineering endeavors if you ever end up in a place you need high performance code. You're going to need a lot of it.