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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article for anyone wanting a "behind-the-scenes-look" at how things work.

It's also great in reminding me: the fact that we've moved to automatical memory managing languages is a HUGE LEAP FORWARD in computing, possibly the biggest leap forward in the last few decades. The amount of code you don't have to deal with, the amount of bugs you're not making on a daily basis, is astounding.

Thank God we're in the age of modern languages. Makes me wonder what the next great leap forward in computing will be.

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I wouldn't call automatic memory management a "huge leap forward" at all. Sure it makes code a bit more concise and eliminates leaks (more or less), but it makes your code less performant and just shifts the problem away from the programmer to the VM instead. It's a leap into lazyness, if anything. It also creates problems since now people think it's OK to "new" objects within a for loop freely

You can probably tell by now that my goto language for any kind of large scale application is still C++ w/ STL for safety :). For small hacks, obviously I'd use python, js or ruby or something like that any day.

On a slightly related note, a just-in-time compiler with a superb garbage collector can be more performant in some situations due to its ability to profile and optimize the code while the application is running.

Such runtime statistical analysis and real-time optimization is not possible in an application that is compiled to native code.

For $189, I can slap a 240GB SSD in the machine to make software more performant. The question you have to ask is: How much optimization can a senior-level programmer accomplish for $189?

JDeveloper (an IDE) takes about 30 seconds to start on my co-workers' computers. On my laptop, boasting a 240GB SSD, JDeveloper is ready in about 5 seconds.

>On a slightly related note, a just-in-time compiler with a superb garbage >collector can be more performant in some situations due to its ability to >profile and optimize the code while the application is running.

No Garbage collector can be faster then a programm that produces no garbage at all, because its programmer knew what he was doing.

>For $189, I can slap a 240GB SSD in the machine to make software more >performant. The question you have to ask is: How much optimization can >a senior-level programmer accomplish for $189?

This ist the typical academic way of optimization: Let's write some programm and then throw hardware on it until it runs fast enough. In the real world, ressources are limited. That $189 are needed for each install of your garbage-collected software, not just YOUR personal develoment machine.

http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CT032V4S...

SSDs are now $51. I don't see this as an academic means of optimization; I see it as a practical business value. Why would I pay a developer to spend 8 hours on optimizations when I can pay a developer to spend 8 hours on features and bug fixes? Meanwhile, I can drop $50 today (as opposed to $200 8 days ago) and get SSDs for the database, web server, and two developer machines?

If SSDs were down to $1 for 64 GB, would you still claim throwing hardware at the problem is an academic solution?

http://www.stefankrause.net/wp/?p=4

"Saying that C is generally several times faster than java is – according to those benchmarks – simply wrong. In other benchmarks Sun and JRockit were even able to beat ICC. Not by much but I guess it’s nevertheless just very remarkable that it’s possible to beat ICC [using a Java Virtual Machine]."

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