Re:Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
by _ph_ on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @02:47PM
(#11338909)
That is, in this general form, wrong. Most compiled languages can match or sometimes exceed C speeds, depending on the task at hand and the algorithm chosen. There are a lot of very inefficient C programs around - because they are badly written. More high-level languages allow the programmer to focus on speed where it matters. And in the current day and age, there should be no reason to favor raw speed vs. program correctness and safety.
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Re:Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
by nwmcsween on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @03:12PM
(#11339161)
You see code size and linearity is very important for anything non-trivial and hot. New languages tend to have abstractions built upon themselves making understanding and optimizing a pain.
Re:Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
by _ph_ on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @03:50PM
(#11339472)
Well, I have plenty experience of working with SBCL which directly gives you access to the assembly produced, allowing extremely good control of the code quality in hot spots. Just
(disassemble 'my-function)
would give a nice printout. There are also lots of other languages, which might be high-level, but still give you excellent code quality - I used Modula-2 a long time ago which did back then beat the resident C-compiler in generated code quality. Yes, many C compilers are very good and some new stuff not much so, but claiming in general that "C" is fast is an oversimplification.