| As a developer who's worked in games, embedded, and real-time situational awareness software (ex. air traffic control), my feeling is exactly the opposite. People often greatly underestimate the amount of performance sensitive software out there, often because they're used to working on software where the hardware isn't a fixed constraint, or are indirectly relying on optimized C/C++ software provided by the system itself. Moreover, simple benchmarks which are often used for comparing languages are not a valid indicator of the performance available in a lower-level language. For example, switching loop-processed data from a standard AOS (array of structures) to a SOA (structure of arrays) format can improve performance by orders of magnitude by reducing cache misses (on an i7, main memory latency is ~25x that of L1 cache). With that latency difference in mind, imagine for a moment the impact of iterating an array of objects stored disparately in memory versus a tightly packed array. Or more related to memory management, a common allocation optimization used in games is to provide a block of per-frame memory; allocations are a simple addition, and deallocation is an assignment. All the easy cleanup of GC, but with a constant (and insignificant) cost. Certainly most of the code does not need to be C++, nor heavily optimized; even the 16/32ms per frame game industry tends towards garbage collected scripting languages for a significant portion of the code base. That does not however obviate the necessity for a systems level language to provide the capacity for such optimization. |
I call availability bias: people who work on high performance niches feel everyone is underestimating the problem. People who work on low-performance niches wonder what's the big deal.
What I have personally observed is more like a fear of poor performance, coming from people who don't understand the problem like you do. So the team choose C++, which eventually leads to an unmaintainable, slow Big Ball of Mud. 'Cause as your AOS vs SOA example demonstrates, C++ doesn't magically make your code fast. Oops.
> That does not however obviate the necessity for a systems level language to provide the capacity for such optimization.
Agreed. Just two caveats: first, C++ is really a last resort, to be used when nothing else will do, not even C+Lua or similar combination. Even for high performance code, this language is way overused. Second, while we all use the high performance infrastructure you speak of, few of us get to write it.