[perfobotto]

What a bunch of bs. There are so many places where computation is far from free and size matters (embedded, HPC for example). And the end of Moore law is just gonna emphasize the need for performance even more. This article just tells me that the author didn’t have to write any performance critical code in his life and he just extended his experience to everything

[dkersten]

> There are so many places where computation is far from free and size matters (embedded, HPC for example).

Even in more typical use cases, it matters: for example performance or memory use can mean the difference between a small or large EC2 instance which has very real cost implications. Or it affects battery life of my phone app. Or between my application feeling fluid or laggy.

All of there’s things have real implications for users.

I very much care when I need a top of the line computer to run some shitty application that should be able to run on 20 year old hardware.

Yet I also understand programmer ergonomics and recently implemented an interpreter for a domain specific language in an already not the fastest language because productivity mattered more to me and correct easy to write domain code mattered more to me. But the point is that it was a conscious decision made after weighing the costs and benefits, not just because I think compute and memory are free. They’re not, this has a real cost for me being able to run it, in terms of servers, but with the benefit that I can replace complex buggy code that took me months to write, with simple easy to understand code that I could write in a few hours (and a thoroughly unit tested parser and interpreter that took a week to write)

[patrec]

Yeah, what would David Moon of all people know about performance critical code.

https://www.h2o.ai/blog/a-brief-conversation-with-david-moon...

[perfobotto]

It doesn’t really matter who wrote it. It’s a comment about the article , not the author himself and the article is approssimative at best. It makes a statement that’s not true in a lot of cases (“computation is almost free”), makes some statements that while agreeable are too high level in how they are expressed like “cost of communication is high” and then the piece ends without any explanation or examples on what he means exactly or what is wrong and how to solve it in enough details to actually be an informative article. It seems like an oversized rant a programmer would make after a bad day at work on Twitter.

[gridlockd]

> There are so many places where computation is far from free and size matters (embedded, HPC for example).

The amount of code where the cost of actual computation isn't vanishingly small relative to memory access is so tiny, it arguably should not dominate the design of a general purpose language.

This wasn't true forty-plus years ago, when these languages were designed, and it's not true on some microcontrollers, but it's generally true today.

The author is completely right in that general purpose languages do virtually nothing to optimize memory access (which is a hard problem), as opposed to optimizing ALU usage (which is relatively easy).