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Comment by burntsushi | Hacker News Reader

Go build that language, build a few high performance tools like I have and call me when you're done. Or point me to existing tools with a benchmark comparison. Then I'll take a look at seriously considering your claims. Until then, your comments read like nonsense to me.

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I've been writing valuable software (with corresponding recompense) for over ten years and have never seen a case where this kind of thing was vital for meaningful performance. Yes, languages without this are never going to write the world's fastest grep (or at least, not without further work that is not currently a priority), but as far as I can see that's just as much of an artificial microbenchmark as measuring how fast your chosen language can loop 1000 times.

> artificial microbenchmark

I'll be sure to let my artificial users know that.

Like, my god man, next time just come out and say, "I do not consider your work or the use cases you care about valid, and thus I am going to dismiss everything you say on that basis." At least be honest.

There's a lot more stuff out there besides grep tools that need to go as fast as possible. I'm glad Rust exists for that and I'm glad its design is full of practical trade offs that people like you don't seem to see as reasonable.

If you elide such a feature from the entire language then you also won't be able to build a fast (standard) library. One of the reasons you usually don't have to overly worry about performance is that the standard library (as well as other libraries) are typically pretty optimized. If you take away the possibility for that optimisation then the entire language becomes slower, by virtue of having a slower standard library.

"Artificial microbenchmarks" are very useful if there's a good chance the code might be called a few thousand times in a loop. If you write generic code that may get used by thousands or even millions of applications then these small differences do matter, and add up.

Also I think a lot of code will be needless awkward too; sometimes I really just want to get the first or second or last index. I don't want or need to iterate: I just want exactly nth entry, nothing more, nothing less. Yes, you need to be careful with it, but entirely removing them is not much of a solution.

As someone else already mentioned, "your response is kind of harsh".

Why not try and be a bit more kind?

You're soc right? There's a reason I have you blocked on every social media web site for which we both are a part and for which it is possible. Go away.

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