Why C++ is not my favourite language
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Why C++ is not my favourite language
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#2That's really cool that this guy thinks dynamic languages have the potential to be faster than C++. Maybe he can write a second article when they are actually faster, with some properly done benchmarks or some valid technical examples.
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#3That's really cool that this guy thinks dynamic languages have the potential to be faster than C++. Maybe he can write a second article when they are actually faster, with some properly done benchmarks or some valid technical examples.
Common Lisp is already quite fast and dynamic. And for the same number of hacker-hours spend in optimizing, you probably get a larger speedup. Also Python+C can be quite a fast combo. Fast to develop and fast to execute. Forth is also quite fast and dynamic, if you grok it.
A lot of functional programming languages have also become quite fast in the last decade. While there are in a sense more fluid than C++, they are normally considered static (and not dynamic) languages.
If you want to compare asymptotic speeds where programmer-hours invested goes to infinity, the lower level languages will probably always win. Like assembler, C or C++.
For benchmarks see: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#4I sympathize with the author's dislike for C++ and while you can't argue that dynamic languages "could" at some point in the future be faster than C++, it's very unlikely to happen since one of the requirements for this kind of speed is for a language to be statically typed. Without type information, the compiler is left with very few options to optimize the generated code.
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#5I guess he's not a systems programmer. What language did Slava Pestov turn to when he recently re-wrote Factor's VM?
C++ programmers: we do the dirty work so you don't have to.
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#6I guess he's not a systems programmer. What language did Slava Pestov turn to when he recently re-wrote Factor's VM? C++ programmers: we do the dirty work so you don't have to.
Indeed. So many of these articles can be boiled down to:
"As long as we limit the comparison to things (our language) does well, and exclude things C/C++ do that (our language) can't do at all, (our language) totally 0wnz C/C++".
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#7The canonical anti-C++ link for me has to be http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ - pretty thorough and reasonably well argued.
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#8I sympathize with the author's dislike for C++ and while you can't argue that dynamic languages "could" at some point in the future be faster than C++, it's very unlikely to happen since one of the requirements for this kind of speed is for a language to be statically typed. Without type information, the compiler is left with very few options to optimize the generated code.
one of the requirements for this kind of speed is for a language to be statically typed
No, one of the requirements for static optimization is that a language be statically typed. It does not follow that there are no ways to make dynamic languages fast, just that they mostly have to use different techniques.
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#9I sympathize with the author's dislike for C++ and while you can't argue that dynamic languages "could" at some point in the future be faster than C++, it's very unlikely to happen since one of the requirements for this kind of speed is for a language to be statically typed. Without type information, the compiler is left with very few options to optimize the generated code.
Ousterhout of Tcl fame has a very nice (and surprisingly old) paper about this. http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html
Re: Why C++ is not my favourite language
#10That's really cool that this guy thinks dynamic languages have the potential to be faster than C++. Maybe he can write a second article when they are actually faster, with some properly done benchmarks or some valid technical examples.
More than 10 years ago Jeffrey Mark Siskind posted micro benchmark [1] of his aggressively optimizing Stalin Scheme compiler versus then-current GCC. Stalin produced code 21 time faster than GCC.
I do not know why this fact remains so little-known.
[1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9801ba2edd...