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by halfcat
684 days ago
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>> You're never going to have any language with the kind of dynamism that Python/Ruby/JS have while also having performant number crunching > Wrong Can you give examples of languages that achieve both? Or is this all just on a spectrum? Like if we say C# is performant, it’s still the case that (eventually) the way to make it faster is “stop writing C#”. |
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That has stopped being true a few years ago and in some cases was never true.
The way for a faster C# codebase is writing faster C#. .NET CoreLib including all performance-sensitive paths like memmove is written in pure C#, and the VM (by that I mean all reflection bits, TypeLoader, etc.) itself, excluding GC, is also pure C# when you are using NativeAOT.
The optimization techniques to achieve this are but not limited to using monomorphized struct generics, stack buffers, arenas and memory pooling, using SIMD API (which has the same performance characteristics as intrinsics in C/C++), not allocating by using structs or making object lifetime GC friendly if allocations cannot be avoided, making otherwise safe code bounds check elision friendly, reducing indirection, etc. Many of these are exact same as what you would do in languages like C, C++ or Rust.
As a result, the use of FFI to call into C/C++/Rust/ObjC/Swift(upcoming native Swift ABI support)/etc. today is predominantly relegated to accessing necessary OS APIs and libraries.
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
Of course most of these optimizations are at odds with "dynamism" and yield the speed-up by making the dispatch static and inlining-friendly, and giving the compiler more information it can prove and make use of. Not to mention C# (together with Swift) sits the closest to the metal among otherwise high-level languages by virtue of what .NET is and what its ILC and JIT compile IL to.