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Comment by DanWaterworth | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself an "advanced coder", whatever that means and so I know that an IRC server is likely to be IO bound. I also know to avoid C, especially multithreaded C. Not because I would be unable to write correct multithreaded C, but because I probably don't have to to solve the problem adequately.

My experience means I know to pick my battles.

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Disclaimer: despite all my praises for Go, I don't actually use it for real problems. Would I like to use Go? Definitely! Is there a problem that I'm trying to solve that needs Go? Certainly not. In many cases I'd objectively pick Rust over Go, but when it comes to threading primitives, Go is somewhat unmatched.

> pick my battles

Exactly my point. A good coder will choose the tool that expresses the solution correctly. C is a very good choice, it always will be, there are sometimes better choices. Ultimately it seems as though we are in agreement; cheers!

Go's threading primitives are not unmatched. You can do the same in Rust [1], but the gold standard in my eyes is STM in Haskell which allows you to block on arbitrary conditions.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/macro.select!.html#examples

OT: why is an IRC server I/O bound? That really piqued my interest.

I've never made an IRC server but I share a similar feel for I/O (Network) being the limiting factor. Have one user write a message and then you need to send out potentially hundreds of thousands of messages. (At twitch scale)

The actual CPU computation going on per event is minimal (process maybe a few kb of text), and if we're only dealing with text, probably not memory (capacity or throughput) bound and certainly not disk bound.

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