Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

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> There's a vast amount of concepts when it comes to "optimization" and we are very far from the limit. There's still tons of research just to improve compiler intelligence for high-level code intention, let alone in runtime performance.

True. I agree. But, take a program (add two numbers, and print the result), and implement it in C / Go / Python / C#. You will find that, the most optimized program in each language, will generate different outputs, machine code wise.

While the C & Go will generate binaries that have X processor instructions, Python & C# will generate more than X.

And there, you have the crux of the issue. Python & C# require runtimes. And those runtimes will have an overhead.

> Virtual machines are an implementation detail

Sorry, I think you have the wrong idea. A VM, is an implementation detail that gets carried to the execution. A VM is the runtime that runs on top of the original runtime(tm) that is the OS. A Go / C program will run directly on the OS. Adding a layer of runtime means reduced performance.

> It seems you're working with outdated and limited context of languages and scenarios.

That just reeks of arrogance.

My point, and the point made by the original comment author is not that C# / Java / Python cannot run billions of requests, its that when you compare cloud charges for running those billions of requests, costs will be less for programs produced by Go / C (and C++ too)

> "Python & C# require runtimes. And those runtimes will have an overhead."

Golang also has a runtime with memory safety, garbage collection, and threading. It's just linked into the native executable and run alongside without a VM but still present.

> "That just reeks of arrogance... costs will be less for programs produced by Go / C (and C++ too)"

You claimed that costs would be the least with Go without any other context. This is neither related to my point (that all stacks get faster over time) nor accurate since other languages are used in similar environments delivering the same or better performance and costs. Again this comes down to "optimization" being far broader than just the language or compilation process.

> Sorry, I think you have the wrong idea. A VM, is an implementation detail that gets carried to the execution. A VM is the runtime that runs on top of the original runtime(tm) that is the OS. A Go / C program will run directly on the OS. Adding a layer of runtime means reduced performance.

After the bytecode has been JIT compiled it runs as close to the metal as a Go program. If you want fast startup you can even compile the code ahead of time and there is absolutely no difference. Apart from .NET not insisting on its own calling convention, which means it has far less overhead when interacting with external libraries than Go.

This whole thread is childish and pointless. Literally 14 year old me would have recognised these arguments and relished getting stuck into them.

I've seen a stack built almost entirely in TCL which handled 10,000 transactions per second for a FTSE 100 company. If that's possible then language is just one choice in the infinite possibilities of production stacks.

> C program will run directly on the OS. Adding a layer of runtime means reduced performance.

A C program that isn't compiled in an embedded context has a runtime layer on top of it. The OS doesn't call your main, it runs the init function of the platforms C runtime to initialize all the bloat and indirection that comes with C. Just like your compiled C program doesn't just execute the native sqrt instruction but runs a wrapper that sets all the state C expects, like the globally visible errno value no one ever checks but some long dead 1980s UNIX guru insisted on. C is portable because just like python and C# it too is specified on top of an abstract machine with properties not actually present in hardware. If you really set out to optimize a C program at the low level you immediately run into all the nonsense the C standard is up to.

JIT compilers run machine code without any overhead, when it comes to actual execution. And the overhead of the compilation can be pushed to another thread, cached, etc.

> A Go / C program will run directly on the OS

https://go.dev/doc/faq#runtime

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