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This article explains a few reasons why Go is fast. This article doesn't claim it uses compiler optimization technology unavailable to other languages, nor does

by 4ad 12y ago

This article explains a few reasons why Go is fast. This article doesn't claim it uses compiler optimization technology unavailable to other languages, nor does it claim it does anything novel. Go is fast, and this article makes a pretty good job explaining why. It makes no judgement on other languages, and all comparisons with other languages are only done to exemplify a particular feature of the Go implementation. This article also doesn't do any Go advocacy, it doesn't claim Go is superior to other languages because of these reasons, it just offers an explanation for some observed performance characteristics to anyone who is interested. Don't attack the article on what it is not. I also think out it's very dishonest to single out a few things form the article which you say don't matter (because they are "standard"), ignoring the most important bits. Go's real-world performance comes from it's value semantics. Yes, Java has one of the best JITs in the world, yet the very-unoptimized Go compiler blows it in real-life code just because of this.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
The article is dishonest or uninformed, it is doing shady things like comparing boxed primitives in Java to unboxed primitives in Go, when Go has boxing and Java has unbowed primitives as well, what!? Like this crap: > Similar to Go, the Java int type consumes 4 bytes of memory to store this value. However, to use this value in a collection like a List or Map, the compiler must convert it into an Integer object. ... > So an integer in Java frequently looks more like this and consumes between 16 and 24 bytes of memory. > This is a Location type which holds the location of some object in three dimensional space. It is written in Go, so each Location consumes exactly 24 bytes of storage. We can use this type to construct an array type of 1,000 Locations, which consumes exactly 24,000 bytes of memory. You could have constructed an array of 3,000 ints in Java also for 24,000 + a header bytes of memory. Go has been around for 4+ years now. There compiler implementation is relatively behind where Java was at around 2000, but perhaps google isn't throwing that many resources at it....or dynamic adaptive compilation really does have an intrinsic advantage. Who knows...

by 4ad 12y ago

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

The article is dishonest or uninformed, it is doing shady things like comparing boxed primitives in Java to unboxed primitives in Go, when Go has boxing and Java has unbowed primitives as well, what!? Like this crap: > Similar to Go, the Java int type consumes 4 bytes of memory to store this value. However, to use this value in a collection like a List or Map, the compiler must convert it into an Integer object. ... > So an integer in Java frequently looks more like this and consumes between 16 and 24 bytes of memory. > This is a Location type which holds the location of some object in three dimensional space. It is written in Go, so each Location consumes exactly 24 bytes of storage. We can use this type to construct an array type of 1,000 Locations, which consumes exactly 24,000 bytes of memory. You could have constructed an array of 3,000 ints in Java also for 24,000 + a header bytes of memory. Go has been around for 4+ years now. There compiler implementation is relatively behind where Java was at around 2000, but perhaps google isn't throwing that many resources at it....or dynamic adaptive compilation really does have an intrinsic advantage. Who knows...