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by kmeisthax 410 days ago
My working definition of "systems programming" is "programming software that controls the workings of other software". So kernels, hypervisors, emulators, interpreters, and compilers. "Meta" stuff. Any other software that "lives inside" a systems program will take on the performance characteristics of its host, so you need to provide predictable and low overhead.

GC[0] works for servers because network latency will dominate allocation latency; so you might as well use a heap scanner. But I wouldn't ever want to use GC in, say, audio workloads; where allocation latency is such a threat that even malloc/free has to be isolated into a separate thread so that it can't block sample generation. And that also means anything that audio code lives in has to not use GC. So your audio code needs to be written in a systems language, too; and nobody is going to want an OS kernel that locks up during near-OOM to go scrub many GBs of RAM.

[0] Specifically, heap-scanning deallocators, automatic refcount is a different animal.
2 comments
skybrian 410 days ago
I wouldn’t include compilers in that list. A traditional compiler is a batch process that needs to be fast enough, but isn’t particularly latency sensitive; garbage collection is fine. Compilers can and are written in high-level languages like Haskell.

Interpreters are a whole different thing. Go is pretty terrible for writing a fast interpreter since you can’t do low-level unsafe stuff like NaN boxing. It’s okay if performance isn’t critical.

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pjmlp 410 days ago
Yes, you can via unsafe.

And if you consider K&R C a systems language, you would do it like back in the day, with a bit of hand written helper functions in Assembly.

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kmeisthax 410 days ago
You don't (usually) inherit the performance characteristics of your compiler, but you do inherit the performance characteristics of the language your compiler implements.
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pjmlp 410 days ago
So that fits, given that Go compiler, linker, assembler and related runtime are all written in Go itself.

You mean an OS kernel, like Java Real Time running bare metal, designed in a way that it can even tackle battleship weapons targeting systems?

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc

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