6 ms·

It is almost time that people stop referring to Languages as Fast or Slow. It is an implementation that is fast or slow, not a language.

• masklinn 14y ago
  Have you considered reading the fucking presentation before snarking out on it?
  • arocks 14y ago
    What makes you think I didn't? The author seems to agree with me. He even concludes that we should improve the implementation rather than the language for optimisation.
    • ynniv 14y ago
      No, the author concludes that languages based on hash table lookups and lacking copy avoidance mechanisms are inherently slower.
    • masklinn 14y ago
      Which makes your comment useless and redundant. The very point of the presentation pretty much being "this declaration makes no sense"
    • tptacek 14y ago
      I didn't get that from the presentation at all. What I read is a guy complaining that idiomatic Python is necessarily slow because it depends, for its clarity and terseness, on not controlling allocations or memory layout, and that Python- the- language abets the problem by having its standard library build on the same idiom.
• systematical 14y ago
  I think its time people stop using shitty slide decks to get their point across.
  • rscott 14y ago
    He gave a talk yesterday at Waza, Heroku's conference. I believe Heroku is planning on uploading videos of the talks in the coming days. I've been interested in this talk since I saw it announced on Twitter, but prefer to watch/listen rather than go through these slides.
  • aroberge 14y ago
    Didn't it occur to you that these slides were for a presentation and that sharing them enable more people than just those that were at the presentation be informed of their content? I, for one, am very grateful to speakers that make the extra effort required to share with a larger group what they have already shared (or are about to share) with a smaller group.
    • alxp 14y ago
      Much better to turn your notes from the talk into an article than to just throw up the slides.
      • koide 14y ago
        But much harder. Slides (with notes!) are a VERY good compromise. Remember: the author does not owe you anything.
• cpressey 14y ago
  This is one of my pet peeves, too.
• rwj 14y ago
  While I agree that implementations can be fast or slow, it does not completely eliminate the effect of the language. At minimum, different languages require different levels of effort to reach their optimum. So, while a language can be hurt by a poor implementation, it does not follow that all languages have the same potential performance. As an example, just consider the enormous amount of effort that has gone into the JVM, and Java is still generally considered to be ~2x slower that C.
• simonster 14y ago
  It's true that implementation makes a bigger difference to performance than language features, but language features can indeed affect speed. One clear example is that a language that checks for integer overflow will be slower than a language that doesn't. There are a lot of situations where there's no way you could optimize out the extra instructions you'd need to check for overflow. Some language features are easy to optimize away for some common cases (e.g. array bounds checks, so that your program throws an exception instead of segfaulting), but you can't optimize these if, for example, you're iterating over data you read from a file using indices you also read from that file.