It’s Faster Because It’s C
pl.atyp.us
It’s Faster Because It’s C
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Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#2Faster is not always what we are after though. I recently wrote a piece of code to run in tightly constrained (but not embedded) environments, and C was the natural choice. The Python or PHP or JavaScript interpreter and VM just wouldn't fit in the RAM.
Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#3C(++) has got a lower memory footprint than Java/C# which is also quite important.
Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#4Faster is not always what we are after though. I recently wrote a piece of code to run in tightly constrained (but not embedded) environments, and C was the natural choice. The Python or PHP or JavaScript interpreter and VM just wouldn't fit in the RAM.
Sometimes you don't want to suck up all of the RAM on a non-embedded machine, either. Also faster startup times and no collector pauses. A lot of times those are required.
Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#5C(++) has got a lower memory footprint than Java/C# which is also quite important.
True; Java makes it very easy to become memory-bound needlessly. No JIT in the world can save you if your primary data structure is a TreeMap with a billion entries.
Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#6Excellent point. You could toss in assembly as yet another choice for the very highly constrained environment (very cheap microcontrollers, although many now have abstractions so you don't actually have to code in assembly directly, it is sometimes necessary).
Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#7Even when IO bound, you might want to spend less of that precious battery when you're not waiting. So even if your perceived speed doesn't change, the battery can tell the difference.
Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#8C is a language, not an implementation. You can JIT C just like any other programming language.
Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#9[deleted]
Re: It’s Faster Because It’s C
#10Faster is not always what we are after though. I recently wrote a piece of code to run in tightly constrained (but not embedded) environments, and C was the natural choice. The Python or PHP or JavaScript interpreter and VM just wouldn't fit in the RAM.
Sometimes you don't want to suck up all of the RAM on a non-embedded machine, either. Also faster startup times and no collector pauses. A lot of times those are required.
collector pauses brings up some discussions I've had with some friends - in essence, it's not something you want your platform to do when you're programming something like a game where you're pushing 60 frames a second + audio.
If you don't know what to look for you could end up looking for a long time.