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A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server

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Re: A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server

#4
post #3

Has Carmack looked at Rust? I'd be very curious for someone like him to look at it in light of his experience with C/C++ and high performance systems.

Pretty sure he's aware of it. And honestly I see the logic, Rust has been top of Tech Empower Benchmarks for a while.

That said, I think the benchmarks could use some tweaking. I'm not sure they are representative.

Re: A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server

#5
post #3

Has Carmack looked at Rust? I'd be very curious for someone like him to look at it in light of his experience with C/C++ and high performance systems.

He's had a look:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/ap2047/john_carmack_w...

Re: A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server

#6
the title is misleading. sure, it advocates for C++, or Java, or C#, or others above Python, but clarifying the context: "a lot (not all!) of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server.", which I take as: "sometimes it's better to write a simple server in a low level language, than a complex server in a higher level language".

Re: A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server

#7
The analogy here is one of the best ice climbers in the world proposing an ascent of the Matterhorn. Please use testable, easy to prototype with, memory managed languages for production servers unless you are solving a very specific problem and really know what you are doing.

Re: A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server

#9
post #3

Has Carmack looked at Rust? I'd be very curious for someone like him to look at it in light of his experience with C/C++ and high performance systems.

Good question, not sure why you were voted down. And I’m not even a Rust fan.

Re: A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server

#10
Many people don't know about Python's GIL https://wiki.python.org/moin/GlobalInterpreterLock

That's the reason why you need to go multi-process if you want to reach a similar level of concurrency in Python as multi-thread in C++. And that surely adds a lot of complexity.

As a very practical example of this, TensorFlow has a dedicated page with advice on how to make the Python part that reads the files from disk less slow. Think about that: The bottleneck for training a highly advanced AI with millions of parameters is in the 20 lines of Python code to read in a binary file...

https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/data_performance

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