Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig...
by gmueckl on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @12:05AM
(#18173254)
If you make this argument about any single component, you end up with low performance across the whole system because it leads to a culture where everybody can point out that their code uses only a few percent of the CPU.
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Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig...
by MaxBarraclough on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @05:25AM
(#18174428)
A valid point, as we should be frustrated that (in desktop computers, say) real user-facing performance hasn't been keeping pace with improvements in hardware.
Every decade, hardware performance skyrockets upward, but developers adopt libraries/frameworks/languages/low standards/habits which give rise to woefully inefficient software. It's so atrocious that it seems to roughly counterbalance the hardware advances. Heavyweight single-page web applications seem to be the endgame of this trend, for now.
See Wirth's law: What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
That said, the 80-20 rule is a real thing. It's possible that you'll get better real performance by writing 80% of your code in Python and the performance-critical 20% in carefully optimised C, than by spending the same amount of time writing it all in Java.