[sklogic]

Nobody really cares about their performance. They're just fine with their simple interpreters. Web is different, there is no choice, no fallback to C.

And no, thank you kind sir, but I've got a very good idea of what compilers are doing wrt. C deficiencies, I was writing OpenCL compilers for 6 years at least. Besides aliasing stupidity and byte-addressing there is nothing really bad to compensate for.

[pcwalton]

> Web is different, there is no choice, no fallback to C.

asm.js and Web Assembly.

> Besides aliasing stupidity and byte-addressing there is nothing really bad to compensate for.

Aliasing issues, C++ heavy reliance on virtual methods, too many levels of indirection in the STL, overuse of signed integers due to "int" being easier to type interfering with loop analysis, const being useless for optimization, slow parsing of header files...

[pizlonator]

All of this!

For example in JS, once you prove that "o.f = v" is not going to hit a setter (or you put a speculative check to that effect), then you know that this effect does not interfere with "v = o.g" (provided you check that it's not a getter). JS VMs are really good at speculating about getters and setters. The result is that alias analysis, and its clients like common subexpression elimination, are super effective. It's only a matter of time before we're creating function summaries that list all of the abstract heaps that a procedure can clobber so even a function call has bounded interference.

This is totally different from C. There, making sure that accesses to o->f and o->g don't interfere is like pulling teeth. And the user can force you to assume that they always interfere by using -fno-strict-aliasing, which is hugely popular.

The fallback-to-C paths on the web aren't that great, though. At least not yet. Once you fall back to C, you're sandboxed into a linear heap with limited access to the DOM and JS heap. But we'll fix that eventually. :-)

[sklogic]

Web Assembly is not even there yet, asm.js up until recent was more a toy and a standalone runtime, I have not seen it being routinely used for a fallback, nothing like, say, python with C modules.

As for virtual methods, it is a problem of a bad C++, devirtualisation may help, but nobody cares in general. We have a cool curiously recurring template pattern instead.

But for the integers you're right. And signedness is still the most annoying source of bugs in the infamous LLVM instcombine.

Headers are a frontend issue, nothing to do with the optimisations.

[pcwalton]

> Web Assembly is not even there yet, asm.js up until recent was more a toy and a standalone runtime, I have not seen it being routinely used for a fallback, nothing like, say, python with C modules.

That's because (a) page performance is frequently gated on things other than JavaScript, so people don't go through a lot of trouble to write C++; (b) many modules that would be written in C in Python are provided by the browser itself; (c) JS itself is usually fast enough, since the gap between JS and C++ is much less than the gap between Python and C++.

> As for virtual methods, it is a problem of a bad C++, devirtualisation may help, but nobody cares in general.

Huh? Tons of people care about devirtualization! Much of the reason Firefox builds go to the trouble of PGO (and it is a huge amount of trouble) is to get devirtualization.

> As for virtual methods, it is a problem of a bad C++

So I could say the same thing about JavaScript: if it's slow, you're writing "bad JS". But you would rightly reject that as invalid: if the code people write in practice is slow, then the problem is with the language encouraging people to write slow code. The point is that the same thing applies to C++.

[sklogic]

See? The evolution of the language and its ecosystem was driven by the peculiar web needs. No surprise the language became what it is now. No surprise it sucks shit every time it spills out of its native domain.

As for C++ - there is a choice. With JS the choice is much more limited. You either rely on non-standard asm.js behaviour, lose DOM access with web assembly, or tolerate the stupidity and limitations of the language that far overgrown its tiny niche.

Btw., I am yet to hear how a language with a fixed syntax and no macros can be perceived as "highly expressive".

[gpderetta]

Re: int, isn't it the reverse? I.e. don't compilers find loops using ints easier to optimise because they can assume the counter does not wrap?

Also, what do you mean by level of indirection in the STL? Pointer chasing or, I suspect, layers of layers of tiny functions that need to be inlined for reasonable performance?