Comment by davismwfl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davismwfl | Hacker News Reader

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> they all perform roughly the same.

This argument to me is usually comes from people who have not done projects of significant scale or that required high performance, which is fine not everyone works on that level of a project. But the small difference of 10ms per operation when having to do a million operations is nearly 2.7 hours of extra time. Even 1ms is an extra 0.25/hr in time. These things start adding up when you are talking about doing millions of operations. And there is nothing wrong with Go or Rust or Python, just they aren't always the right tool in the toolbox when you need raw performance. Neither is C/C++ the right tool if you don't need that level of control/performance.

When doing distributed systems or embedded work you generally learn these rules quickly as one "ok" performing system can wreck a really well planned system, or start costing a ton of money to spin up 10x the number of instances just because of one software component isn't performant.

Rust was created by/for systems programmers who are in exactly that situation - where performance and control are not optional - and thus have been stuck writing C++ for decades. Although C++ has evolved over the years, there are pain points, particularly regarding modularity, that persist and may require a clean break.

It's still somewhat early but I do already see software being written in Rust with best in class performance (take ripgrep for a prominent example), so lumping it in with Go and Python is really a category error in my opinion.

Personally, I'm still writing C++ for the platform support, etc. but not pretending to like it.

Yea, I see your point, lumping Rust in with Python or Go isn't really fair nor accurate.

Totally agree C++ definitely has pain points still, but I do love the fact C++ is getting pretty regular updates so it is getting better and less painful generally. Rust is something I want to use in production but haven't seen the right opportunity to do it where the risk to reward ratio was right, yet.

I concede that I mostly work on web applications that don't require that level of performance.

You're certainly right, there IS a performance difference, and in high-computing workloads, such as the one this parser is used for.

From a "regular" web developer perspective (ie. where you only a few servers/VPS's MAX) a lot of newcomers often worry about performance, and usually for most web development the answer with performance is "Yes language [here] is faster then Python/Javascript/Ruby/etc. But those languages/frameworks allow us to develop our application far faster, and ~10ms isn't an issue." Only after performance bottlenecks are discovered would we consider breaking out pieces into a lower level language.

You're completely right though, in HPC it is totally worth worrying about every millisecond, I took the wrong perspective with the implications of the performance differences.

To be fair, most people do not work on applications that need that level of performance.

Most of the time, and to your point, that level of performance isn't necessary so using a language that is less likely to let you take your foot off is generally the best & most correct choice. I only resort back to C/C++ when I need the pure raw performance like this parser would, or when doing embedded work. Otherwise I reach for other tools in the tool-bag that are less likely to let me maim myself unintentionally.

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