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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

[Languages like Rust] do help you to write more features with fewer bugs, but they are not of much help when you need to squeeze the very last flop from the hardware you rent.

I do think that Rust helps you squeeze out that last 1% of performance over C++. Because instead of spending all day finding that one line of code where an unsafe threaded memory access leads to a race condition bug, I can spend more time performance profiling and optimizing the hot spots.

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Beyond that, this article is just a little bit absurd. Say what you will about Rust but it's a functional and gradually maturing ecosystem powering more and more things as time goes by. Given that it's sorta-kinda intended to build the kind of things C++ does, the idea that it'll eventually overtake C++ is at least plausible. In comparison this article claims that

1) A cool research language packaged into a VS Code plugin 2) A cool research compiler for Python + numpy 3) A cool generic ISA project

will kill C++? Maybe for the author's _very_ specific use case of blindly copying things from SymPy, but really I think you'd have better odds betting on a D resurgence.

> 3) A cool generic ISA project

I wish we had an ISA with non-linear, two-level memory space, so you can have non-overlapping arrays for free (well, as free as virtual memory required to support that would be free): that would mean that e.g. realloc() will never have to call memmove(), range checks are inescapable since they're baked into hardware, etc.

But implementing (and using) C on such an ISA will be deeply unpleasant, so it will just die because if something doesn't run C efficiently... it won't be used.

You still need something to identify which memory space the array is from. Unless you are talking about some form of hardware copy-on-write, this is no better than what we have today

Compared to Spiral, though? I’d prefer ‘automatically finding the optimal solution for a target architecture’ to ‘spending my time performance profiling’ with Rust.

Does Spiral have a competitive ecosystem? Raw performance is useful but when you build, as the article suggests, a cloud service you need more than fast calculations.

Also I'm not sure how the article author thinks Python libraries & tools can beat C++ but disregards other languages for not achieving the same (or better) out of the box. If Python can be made to compete with C++ any language can, and almost any other language is more preferrable to me than Python when it comes to production code.

Similar arguments apply to Java, which can kick C++s butt if the process is long-lived.

I was going to drop a link to back that up and was shocked to find it in the bible:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/05/26/when-is-java-f...

Yeah I guess OP never heard of the Rust based components in Firefox.

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