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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

Circa 2011 the maintainer of the benchmark game decided to mostly only allow one implementation of each language[0] following pypy developers trying to get program alternatives which weren't pypy-pessimal.

[0] some languages get a bye for some reason e.g. MRI and JRuby, but no pypy, and which implementation is blessed is also arbitrary e.g. javascript is v8 but lua is lua.

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> alternatives which weren't pypy-pessimal

Not true.

Back-in-the-day Joe LaFata contributed specially written-for PyPy pi-digits, spectral-norm, mandelbrot programs and they were all shown on the website side-by-side with the CPython programs.

Back-in-the-day I noticed the Python n-body program failed with PyPy, I asked about the problem and was told "we have nbody_modified in our benchmarks" and then I asked them to contribute the specially modified for PyPy program -- and it was displayed on the website within 3 hours.

https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2010/03/introducing-pypy-12-re...

2011 didn't have as widespread Clang/LLVM usage. Now that it is so ubiquitous, probably a good time to revisit for C...

C needs to defend its reputation now!

I am saying this as someone who loved C for my entire life, when I was in college I did implement most of the assignments in C when prof said python is okay, but I did in C because I loved it and I thought I would learn more by doing them in C.

So no hard feeling involved.

There is no reputation to defend. You mean security problems everywhere ? do you mean old, broken, nasty build systems ? Do you mean not having single good package management ? The language (C/C++) is clearly intractable (parsing wise), it is 2017 and we don't have single good IDE for them (I don't use IDE at all, but I am sure you agree with me how much an IDE is important for newcomers)

If that is the case I think writing assembly would outperform C like shit, and with that logic asm is much better than C.

And to be honest, I am in job finding phase and preparing for jobs, if this wasn't my plan right now, I would abandoned C and C++ (even C++{11,14}) for Rust in heartbeat.

The language (Rust) clearly is awesome language, well designed, does have perfect build system (have you seen Cargo ? it is wonderful), flexible language design (you can write OS in rust -not having runtime- and you can write web app in Rust). I am stuck with C and C++ for now, but if my opinion counts , Rust is superior in every aspect to C/C++.

Even if Rust were slower a little bit (+/- 10%) I wouldn't mind. Because its ecosystem is so healthy I would trade 10% of my program performance to having something as nice as Rust.

Right. The only thing C had going for it was that it was the fastest non-assembly language.

I'm biased, I want all C development halted and moved over to Rust. If C is no longer the fastest, for some definition of that, then no one should be defending it at this point.

Honestly, I want the LLVM optimized C version specifically so that this last argument for C in any context will be taken off the table. I'm sure there are some people saying, "but it's not using the same compiler backend and optimizer...", I want this to counter that.

Rust all the things.

I am asking this genuinely, I always thought and heard LLVM optimizer is inferior to GCC's. Am I wrong ? is there any scientific benchmark for this ?

I think they make different choices in different situations. My understanding has been that they are generally the same, with one doing much better in different situations.

But I have nothing to back this up. Wouldn't it be cool if the benchmark game provided a datapoint on this?

"If you're interested in something not shown on the benchmarks game website then please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements."

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex

It's really hard to quantify enormous (millions-of-lines) complex pieces of code that simply. LLVM and GCC take broadly the same approach to optimization: an SSA-based IR with dozens of passes, followed by lowering to a machine-specific IR with many more passes, followed by machine code generation, register allocation, and cleanup optimizations.

Basically, all you can really say is: LLVM is better at some code; GCC is better at other code. The differences are at the level of highly situational details at this point, not broad strokes.

My understanding was that GCC was better in more scenarios most of the time, but now it seems like Clang has caught up. and Maybe Clang 4.0 is even faster in more.

Here are some recent benchmarks from phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gcc7-clan...

Yeah. But in this kind of tuned benchmark, I doubt clang will do any better across the board - especially not considering the fact that the current programs are likely to be at least somewhat tuned specifically for gcc.

Clang does well enough to be the default compiler for Apple and Google. It can't be that far behind.

Oh yeah, I have no reason to believe it's worse; it's just that I also doubt it's going to help much either.

But... trial and error and all ;-).

>Right. The only thing C had going for it was that it was the fastest non-assembly language.

Not really. C has lots of existing code, lots of developers who know it, and for many platforms it is the only language for which you'll find a compiler. As a language it is a trainwreck, but it does have a sizeable moat.

Yes. And I recently did an experiment at work using corrode on some existing software, with some decent results. I was able to easily translate one source file to Rust, and then link that into the existing make based build.

I've also experimented with just FFI for similar integration, with similar ease.

The point is, even with large code bases in C, you can start to migrate and stop feeding the beast.

> The only thing C had going for it was that it was the fastest non-assembly language.

Which only happened after the widespread of UNIX clones into the industry.

Back in the 80's and early 90's, the C compilers for 8 and 16 bit home computers generated pretty crappy code, versus what humans were able to write in Assembly.

> it is 2017 and we don't have single good IDE for them

What are your criteria for a good IDE for C/C++?

> javascript is v8

Kind-of: Node.js actually.

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