[bjoli]

Idiomatic java is like idiomatic C: pretty fast. Most smaller languages prioritize other things. Clojure has immutability and Haskell has purity.

I have noticed this with every "X produces code faster than C": you begin with two programs that use a suboptimal algorithm, then you take your non-c language and try to write C in it. The result is always awful and removes most reasons not to use C in the first place.

This has somewhat changed with rust and in some sense C++,but for other languages my point still stands. They have a nice idiomatic golden path that is fast enough for most cases. Once you need performance badly enough you have to treat you language as an assembler, and then you will always lose to languages that actually are good at that.

I say this as a scheme/Haskell weenie. Writing really performance scheme and Haskell code often means writing ugly code.

[Scarbutt]

I say this as a scheme/Haskell weenie. Writing really performance scheme and Haskell code often means writing ugly code.

The same with Clojure, suddenly you start writing Java with parenthesis.

In the JVM, if you want absolute control over performance its better to just write Java for those parts (don't know much about Kotlin).

[vbezhenar]

Kotlin generally is not slower than Java. One exception is that it inserts a lot of null checks. And there are features that will make it even faster than Java, I'm talking about inline lambdas.

[pvorb]

The compiler is significantly slower than Java's, though.

[vbezhenar]

That's the sad truth for a lot of modern compiled languages (I think Go is an exception). While I did not dig into their compiler internals, it just seems an inevitable consequence from a powerful language (Go is pretty simple in that regard). C++, Rust, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, they all have significantly longer compilation times compared to their predecessors. Probably that's the price we have to pay.

[bjoli]

Chez compiles a 80Kloc project of mine in less than a second, and apparently that is still 2x slower than before they switched to a nanopass compiler.

There is no reason compiling things should not compile at similar speeds to chez unless you are telling your compiler to ootimise everything.

C++/ruae are just exceptionally slow and it became the new bottom line somehow. I know rust does a lot of housekeeping, but after using chez and sbcl, 45s for a 1.5kloc project is killing me inside.

[pjmlp]

Not really.

.NET Native, D, Delphi, Ada and Eiffel also have pretty fast compilers, while offering quite powerful languages.

Lets even pick Turbo Pascal 7.0 for MS-DOS, which was quite feature rich, and was able to compile very large programs in a couple of seconds.

Also Visual C++ with modules preview support, incremental compilation and linking is also reasonably faster than the FOSS alternatives.

It is only a matter how much money one is willing to invest into improving tooling support.

[cryptos]

As far as I know Google is supporting JetBrains in making the Kotlin compiler faster.