[1] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan... [2] https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?la...
stirner seems to mean something different by "competitive".
> System programming requires a great degree of hardware awareness. Its goal is to achieve efficient use of available resources, either because the software itself is performance critical (AAA video games) or because even small efficiency improvements directly transform into significant monetary savings for the service provider (cloud based word processors).
So the question is, having been able to achieve half of the allowed budget, why pay for more development effort?
Of course, if the bugdet is only achievable with a lower level language, there is no way around using it.
Personally, I don't think this is even an interesting metric. These are tools for experts, understanding expert experiences is more interesting.
To address the heart of what you're getting at: I don't buy the fact that it took "10x" longer to read an XML file. I'll give you some amount of "longer" just by virtue of Rust's general strictness and lengthy semantics (like any systems language), but you can't just squash together your unfamiliarity with the language or its libraries and use that to determine the base line difficulty of implementation. To highlight this, consider a seasoned C# developer trying to read an XML file in python for the first time. It would probably take them "10x" longer in python too, and it won't be because the languages have different purposes/audiences or the languages' rules and conventions.
I'd take the view that "a little script to read an XML file, get a path from it, read a file at that location, do some regexes on it, and then update the XML and write it back to disk" doesn't need any more speed than Python, but can benefit from more correctness. I'm willing to spend a bit more implementation time than Python to get more safety than Python, but I'm not willing to spend extra time just to make it faster (and frankly I'd question the priorities of someone who would). If implementing in Rust is slower than a more error-prone language, that's not necessarily a mark against it - but if I can implement faster than Rust in a language that would also have similar safety properties then I'd rather do that, even if it meant somewhat slower runtime performance.
Why? Does this really make sense? You write it once, it runs a multitude of times. Why is the extra 30 minutes (maybe) to implement in Rust worth more than the extra CPU cycles over countless runs? It's going to be less error prone and faster.
CPU cycles are cheap - my CPU is idle most of the time - and my time is expensive. Given that the script in question is fetching a file over FTP, the time taken for that is going to swamp any compute time (even in the Python implementation). Even if you could make a version that ran instantly, how many times would I have to run the script to add up to saving 30 minutes of my time? It doesn't sound like the kind of script that's going to be in use for decades.
> It's going to be less error prone and faster.
Sure, but the overwhelming majority of the time "faster" doesn't matter. So I'm much more interested in comparing languages that have the same safety properties, and whether it's possible to get the same "less error prone" effect from a language that's easier to work in than Rust.
That doesn't surprise me at all. Writing it in C++ would probably take me a lot longer than writing it in Python too.