3 ms·
This framing is misleading. I'm not sure what AI has to do with any of the examples you cited. All of the examples you cited are moves - and in some cases, not
by asa400 4mo ago
This framing is misleading. I'm not sure what AI has to do with any of the examples you cited. All of the examples you cited are moves - and in some cases, not even moves, as Shopify is not ditching Ruby - to more performant runtimes and architectures in response to operational concerns at scale, which have a tenuous link to language, and no link to AI that I can see, as these companies all significantly predate LLMs.
Ruby's runtime in the early 2000's compared poorly against the JVM or the BEAM. People used Ruby then and now because it worked well to get products to market quickly. Even after a ton of investment in Ruby's implementation, the JVM and the BEAM are still better able to handle the types of high-traffic, high-concurrency workloads those companies serve, which makes them relevant to mature, high-scale companies.
Tellingly, there are dynamic language implementations that are performance-competitive with static language implementations, like Javascript's V8/Bun/Deno, Lua's LuaJIT, and Common Lisp's SBCL (among others, this is not an exclusive list).
- mixolydianagain 4mo ago> to more performant runtimes and architectures in response to operational concerns at scale, which have a tenuous link to language The runtime performance and the language are deeply linked. None of the dynamically typed runtimes you mention are actually performance competitive with JVM languages.
- DoesntMatter22 4mo agoThey don’t really need to be though. They take far fewer tokens and are still faster to develop with
- asa400 4mo agoThey absolutely are. Maybe not if the only thing you’re benchmarking is something completely CPU bound like signal processing/math, but they’re definitely competitive for tons of real use cases.
- shakna 4mo agoLuajit and SBCL are very much performance competitive with the JVM? Why do you say that they're not? Random example benchmark: https://madnight.github.io/benchmarksgame/lisp.html https://madnight.github.io/benchmarksgame/lisp.html
- igouy 4mo agoThat's someone's 8 year old mirror of the benchmarks game website. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/performance/fannkuchredux.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
- shakna 4mo agoHuh. And after eight years, SBCL and Java are side by side, still.
- igouy 4mo ago> Huh. The hardware changed. The way measurements were made changed. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/how-programs-are-measured.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... The Java version changed. The SBCL version changed. > side by side You'd have to say what you mean by that.
- shakna 4mo ago> You'd have to say what you mean by that. They appear, literally, side by side, in the list. That is, they were competitive eight years ago. They are still competitive today.
- igouy 4mo agoBy design, the 8 year old page you linked presented Lisp measurements side-by-side against Java measurements (by excluding the other programs). There's overlap across most of the different language implementations: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/box-plot-summary-charts.html#chart-fastest-elapsed https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...