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Comment by Const-me | Hacker News Reader

An old quote indeed.

In modern world, any sufficiently complicated C or C++ program embeds a runtime of some higher level language. More often than not, that language is formally specified, well-supported, and fast.

Sometimes it’s indeed LISP like in AutoCAD, but more popular choices are JavaScript (all web browsers), LUA (many video games and much more, see Wireshark), Python, VBScript or VBA (older Windows software), .NET runtime (current Windows software and some cross-platform as well, like Unity3D game engine). These days, it’s rarely a custom language runtime, but it still happens, like Matlab.

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Which of those is actually formally specified? Also, calling Python or JavaScript any effieicnt sounds a bit unwarranted. Consider any JavaScript desktop application, its power and memory usage... it's a mess.

> Consider any JavaScript desktop application, its power and memory usage... it's a mess.

I'm running VSCode right now with many tabs open and extensions running, and it's using less than 100mb of memory. Doesn't seem so bad to me

> using less than 100mb of memory. Doesn't seem so bad to me

You know... any embedded programmer reading that comment is probably laughing hysterically. In most cheap or energy efficient microcontrolers, more than 4 Mb is considered a luxury.

A friend of mine has been developing a small Lisp which starts at 2Kbytes RAM: http://www.ulisp.com

I mean sure, but he's talking about desktop applications.

Depends on the exact numbers. For instance, Allwinner R328 chip has 2 ARM cores running up to 1.2GHz, includes 64MB or 128MB RAM, and the price is around $3.

Ok.

There is no virtue in using less memory for the sake of it. If a desktop application is taking 100mb, you can have a lot of those running before modern boxes start to struggle.

Whether 100Mb usage is unacceptably large is mostly dependent on the precise features in play:

* 32-bit vs 64-bit application(64 bit will bloat all pointers)

* Methods of loading and editing documents(modern editing attempts a lot of introspection based on highlighting syntax or project environment)

* Character encoding support(Supporting current Unicode rendering would almost immediately take you beyond 4Mb)

Interactive editing is a pretty memory-hungry task compared to a simple viewer or batch processor. There's more reason to keep things cached. If you actually go back to old text editor versions from the days of 4Mb desktops, you'll find yourself missing stuff. Not so much that you can't get by, but enough to give pause and consider taking the hit.

100 mb to edit text seems not great...

VS Code does a lot more than "edit text" even out of the box with no extensions.

Have you ever installed enough Vim or Emacs plugins to reach feature parity and then looked at memory usage? VS Code is doing a fine job.

~100,000,000 bytes! That's a lot of "state".

Are you sure you didn’t forget to count all the electron helper processes as well?

> I'm running VSCode right now with many tabs open and extensions running, and it's using less than 100mb of memory. Doesn't seem so bad to me

uh... is it ? no tabs open and less than 12 extensions, the code process itself takes 120 megabytes, and there's also 1.2 gigabyte of electron processes running along with it

> Which of those is actually formally specified?

Many of them are international standards, see ANSI INCITS 226-1994 for LISP, ECMA-262 and ISO/IEC 16262 for JavaScript, ECMA-334 and ISO/IEC 23270:2018 for C#. Lua and Python aren’t standardized, but even so, they both have a comprehensive formal spec.

> calling Python or JavaScript any efficient sounds a bit unwarranted

Both are much slower at number crunching compared to C or C++ but they aren’t that bad, either. Most JavaScript VMs feature a good JIT compiler. Some Python runtimes have JIT too.

> Consider any JavaScript desktop application, its power and memory usage.

There’re good ones, like VSCode. On average they’re indeed not great, but I think it’s just an unfortunate consequence of low entry barrier. It’s easy for inexperience people to get started with the technology. And the ecosystem is misjudged based on the output of these inexperienced developers.

Python is actually scary fast because anybody that uses it for serious numerical work will use numpy.

ie "python is scary fast because anyone who uses it is mostly running C"

Yep. This goes for a lot of environments. It's going to take many many decades to get rid of C. Probably more than it has been here up to now.

Doesn't always mean it's particularly performant, unfortunately. The JSON lib in PHP is still C (part of Zend), but it's very susceptible to malloc failures (one big contiguous request for the whole shebang), and it's generally way faster to serialize arrays into a .PHP file you load than into JSON if you're storing it locally. I compared what I read there to the serde stuff for rust and the difference is stark.

Maybe having most of this stuff in c libs with scripts wrapped around them will make it easier to migrate. Keep the same py but swap out the lib from C to some rust that's still useful in a crate for pure rust projects.

what you’re really saying is that C is fast and python is slow. I don’t think that was ever in debate.

>In modern world, any sufficiently complicated C or C++ program embeds a runtime of some higher level language. More often than not, that language is formally specified, well-supported, and fast.

More often than not? Almost none of the languages mentioned are "formally specified", and most of them are hardly fast either...

> Almost none of the languages mentioned are "formally specified"

They all have written specs. Many of them even have these specs standardized, see ANSI INCITS 226-1994, ISO/IEC 16262 and ISO/IEC 23270:2018.

> most of them are hardly fast either

It’s borderline impossible to be fast compared to C or C++. By that statement I meant 2 things.

(1) They’re likely to be much faster compared to whatever ad-hoc equivalent is doable within reasonable budget. People spent tons of resources improving these runtimes and their JITs, it’s very expensive to do something comparable.

(2) On modern hardware, their performance is now adequate for many practical uses. This is true even for resource-constrained applications like videogames or embedded/mobile software, which were overwhelmingly dominated by C or C++ couple decades ago.

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