News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Memory Safety Is Merely Table Stakes by alex_smart on Friday June 27, 2025 @12:47AM (#44393775)
> performance above all — has touched every generation of programmers

I find it hard to reconcile this with the actual observed trend of all software getting slower and more memory intensive over time

Re:Memory Safety Is Merely Table Stakes by kelseyfrog on Friday June 27, 2025 @02:05AM (#44394069)
You can simply scroll down in this very comments section to find folks arguing about the performance characteristics of various languages in the context of making claims about their benefits. Res ipsa loquitur
Re:Memory Safety Is Merely Table Stakes by eviks on Friday June 27, 2025 @02:11AM (#44394102)
That's simple indeed, but also simply wrong. Reality of actually written apps is a way more important factor than such comments, and in that reality the cult of performance is tiny, not crowding out everything else
Re:Memory Safety Is Merely Table Stakes by sevensor on Friday June 27, 2025 @07:57AM (#44396068)
My observation from internal C projects I’ve worked with is that they often end up doing the wrong thing very fast, because the right thing is so hard to express in C. If you do the wrong thing ten million times, it can start to approximate the right thing. The best of all worlds is using a low level language for speed and a high level language for dealing with complexity. I very much doubt there’s one right language for everything.