Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jonathaneunice 411 days ago
Is "single user graphics workstation" even still a goal? Great target in the Early to Mid Ethernetian when Xerox Dorados and Dandelions, Symbolics, and Liliths roamed the Earth. Doesn't feel like a modern goal or standard of comparison.

I used those workstations back in the day—then rinsed and repeated with JITs and GCs for Self, Java, and on to finally Python in PyPy. They're fantastic! Love having them on-board. Many blessings to Deutsch, Ungar, et al. But for 40 years JIT's value has always been to optimize away the worst gaps, getting "close enough" to native to preserve "it's OK to use the highest level abstractions" for an interesting set of workloads. A solid success, but side by side with AOT compilation of closer-to-the-machine code? AOT regularly wins, then and now.

"Solved" should imply performance isn't a reason to utterly switch languages and abstractions. Yet witness the enthusiasm around Julia and Rust e.g. specifically to get more native-like performance. YMMV, but from this vantage, seeing so much intentional down-shift in abstraction level and ecosystem maturity "for performance" feels like JIT reduced but hardly eliminated the gap.
2 comments
kragen 411 days ago
"Single-user graphical workstation" may not be a great goal anymore, but it's at least a sobering milestone to keep failing to reach.

AFAIK there isn't an AOT compiler from JVM bytecode to native code that's competitive with either HotSpot or Graal, which are JIT compilers. But the JVM semantics are much less dynamic than Python or JS, whose JIT compilers don't perform nearly as well. Even Jython compiled to JVM bytecode and JITted with HotSpot is pretty slow.

However, LuaJIT does seem to be competitive with AOT-compiled C and with HotSpot, despite Lua being just as dynamic as Python and more so than JS.

link
pjmlp 411 days ago
It is solved to the point the users on those communities are not writing extensions in C all the time, to compensate for the interpreter implementation.

AOT winning over JITs on micro benchmarks hardly wins in meaningful way for most business applications, especially when JIT caches and with PGO data sharing across runs is part of the picture.

Sure there are always going to be use cases that require AOT, and in most of them is due to deployment constraints, than anything else.

Most mainstream devs don't even know how to use PGO tooling correctly from their AOT toolchains.

Heck, how many Electron apps do you have running right now?

link