4 ms·
"Maybe it's speed, though I really wonder about that, given our blistering fast processors and endless banks of RAM" I've seen this thought hundreds of times o
by benched 13y ago
"Maybe it's speed, though I really wonder about that, given our blistering fast processors and endless banks of RAM"
I've seen this thought hundreds of times over the last decade, and I don't think it's a very good one. If execution environment A is twice as fast as B, it will still be twice as fast after the processor speed doubles. Mostly, we usually want to do as much as we can with the hardware we have.
- t1m 13y agoIf we are looking at the universe of Rails and Python programmers coming to C, then yeah, I think we can assume they aren't doing it for the exotic address manipulation operations and their colleague's prestige ;) It's speed. It is also almost always interesting. It reveals a boundary that has been crossed, a bottleneck plugged. I think that us HLL devs always like to think we have C in our back pockets. We say, "well if performance is bad we will profile then rewrite that bit in C". Then, when faced with the reality of actually having to write something in C, well it's a different story. We think the performance increase will be dramatic, but often we are left with something that performs worse than the original HLL equivalent, and that leaks memory and frequently crashes to add insult to injury!
- dllthomas 13y agoIf A is twice as fast as B, it'll save you half as much time after the processor speed doubles.
- AndrewBissell 13y agoAnd the endless banks of RAM aren't really all that helpful to performance when it still takes eons to actually fetch the bits from them.
- wting 13y agoIf you're creating an IO bound application (e.g. Dropbox, most web sites) then the developer time gained may be worth the performance offset.