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Comment by FpUser | Hacker News Reader

Not a word about the elephant in a room - difference made by underline server technology. Here is the latest example from yours truly: was running a test for a week on my custom http multithreaded stateful server written in C++ that calculates some complex programmable proprietary metrics and serves results as JSON. Beats the system it replaces more than 150 times performance wise sustainable. So that is 150 times less energy per transaction. Not shabby.

As to horrors of manual memory management - there are none as there is not a single place where my code explicitly allocates/deallocates memory. Modern C++ is pretty good in this department.

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Welcome to the good ship 'Modern C++'.

You're right too. Most Cloud software is JVM based (Kafka, etc). I would be quite interested to see how more efficient things would be if they were ported to C++. Cassandra is a JVM-based NoSQL DB that has a C++ port called Scylla. Scylla destroys the JVM version.

It can definitely be true, but it depends what your service does, if you do regular HTML pages what you want is an infrastructure that can do fast string handling, for that I wouldn’t pick C++.

And if you need more developer time is also a consumption of energy.

I think a more common problem is relying on general frameworks regardless of platform. Frameworks solves a general problem, but you solve a specific problem, as your example shows.

How much would it save to use SQL SELECT with the columns you need instead of a ORM that fetches everything?

Or what about API endpoints that deliveries everything to single page app that only needs a few values?

Most data deliveries online today is never used only to be discarded. And you have that discarding of data at two different places, between the database & the backend and then between the backend and the client. That is probably a higher cost than changing server language.

You are making an awful lot of assumptions without having enough info about this particular application.

No, I didn't.

Quote myself "but you solve a specific problem, as your example shows."

So I have to assume your choice of technology for your problem was the correct one & the stats you supply seems to backup such claim.

However you also implying a bigger claim that C++, or something similar, is preferable in web development, where you mostly do string handling, is not something I can agree with.

>"However you also implying a bigger claim that C++, or something similar, is preferable in web development, where you mostly do string handling, is not something I can agree with."

I was contracting with a decent size org a while ago and they had tons of web applications, some of them very giant. The total size of their code is insane and it is all PHP and Python on a server size. I was personally dealing with their application that had more than 5000 source code files. There was a lot of logic in there I would say, not just ReadString / TransformString / WriteString. That particular application would've definitely benefited from faster language.

I understand that in many cases most of the heavy lifting is done with the libs created in C/CPP and the rest is just a thin glue but I do not really know the real world stats on a subject.

So you can be right or not or the truth is somewhere in a middle.

> So that is 150 times less energy per transaction.

I'm about a hundred percent certain that that's not at all how that works.

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