Comment by geocar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geocar | Hacker News Reader

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> > Rust is way more complicated than it should be

> People often make this statement, but I don't know exactly what it means.

I can't speak for op, but you're right: people often make this statement. I'll try to explain what I might mean:

C is way more complicated than it should be.

The things we want in a language are tools that allow us to tell the computer what to do, but because people are bad at that, language design is taking us in the direction of telling the computer what we mean so it can tell us whether we're talking gibberish or not.

I don't need a type system. I don't need "warnings" about converting floats to chars: I know what I'm doing and why. I have a good idea what kind of machine code the compiler is producing, and yes: I often objdump to make sure.

If I need a FSM, I'll use erlang. If I need any kind of data processing, I'll probably use K/Q where I can. I can write some fast stuff in C where I need it. If I just need to bosh some stuff together I have perl. Maybe I want to fantasize about a DSL? It'll probably be a lisp or a forth. If I wanted a strong type system for units I want to get from some model nerds, I'll use OCaml.

I don't see the point in Rust when doing these things takes more code and runs slower, and worse:

> Rust is 2 years into it's stable life. It's young.

I got burned by Python when it was" two years into its stable life" sometime around 1.5 and again around 2.2, and so I hesitate even looking at rust unless in a decade it can still run and compile rust programs written today.

This whole "let's rewrite everything in rust" is good practice. I'm watching you guys do it, and I know afterwards you'll try to beat the performance I'm getting in other languages.

Once you're writing programs that are smaller and faster than me, then we'll probably talk.

> C: I've met more undefined behavior that makes me not agree.

I don't write C like most people, so perhaps I don't have trouble with it like most people. My C programs don't leak memory or crash, and I tend to use a belt+braces approach to security that is very difficult in languages without good multiprocess support.

> I don't need a type system. I don't need "warnings" about converting floats to chars: I know what I'm doing and why.

No, you don't.

Regardless of your skills and seniority (I'm guessing pretty junior with this kind of hubris), there will come a time where you will make mistakes that can be caught by a good compiler. You want this compiler at your side, and the more statically typed your language is, the more robust your code will be.

> Once you're writing programs that are smaller and faster than me, then we'll probably talk

What a strange metric. Assembly language would probably meet these requirements but surely, you would not consider it.

> I'm guessing pretty junior with this kind of hubris

If you check their profile their site suggests that have ~15 years of experience.

That's just management experience.

I've been programming professionally for almost thirty years at this point.

That's admittedly long enough to get some peculiar ideas about programming, but there's a certain kind of person that thinks "statically typing" is a panacea for programming mistakes -- or even that there's a single solution for anything at all...

I wouldn't trust anyone who thinks a solution is a panacea in the software field, but having type annotations demonstrably leads to not just more correct code but also code that can be understood better by its surrounding tooling, thereby enabling automatic refactorings, auto completion, smart browsing, optimizations, etc...

Static typing is not perfect but it's better in all respects than dynamic typing.

> I wouldn't trust anyone who thinks a solution is a panacea in the software field

... unless of course that solution is static typing.

> Static typing is not perfect but it's better in all respects than dynamic typing.

Except performance, of course: A dynamically-typed language is at the top of the STAC-M3 benchmarks for time series data processing.

Oh and defect count: Qmail has the lowest defect count of any source-available software in the last twenty years and it's written in C.

So I guess static typing is better unless you want correct code that runs quickly, which unfortunately is important to me.

Can you point to these Stac-M3 results and maybe at least mention that language? I wasn't able to find it.

Static languages are universally recognized and demonstrated as faster than dynamically typed languages, even if you claim to have found one rare exception. This is not just an opinion, it's scientific and objective fact.

But please share with us that code that runs more quickly on a dynamic language than a static language for you, I am genuinely curious (and equally curious to find out if you just made this up).

> Can you point to these Stac-M3 results and maybe at least mention that language? I wasn't able to find it.

That makes sense, since your background isn't in high performance computing and you can't use google:

https://stacresearch.com/m3

The first item on the list is written in an interpreted language.

> This is not just an opinion, it's scientific and objective fact.

I've just demonstrated two counterexamples, so it's clearly not "scientific and objective fact". Indeed I've never met anyone who even thought Rust would outperform an experienced C programmer in programmer speed, program runtime, and low program size.

>The first item on the list is written in an interpreted language.

Could I see the code? Because I'm pretty sure you can't write a fast numeric code without the knowledge of which type you will get on input. That's why fortran still rocks and we do nat have anything beyond fortran, c and c++ in the field of computation.

> Because I'm pretty sure you can't write a fast numeric code without the knowledge of which type you will get on input. That's why fortran still rocks and we do nat have anything beyond fortran, c and c++ in the field of computation.

You're not far off.

The first trick is that even though `x` can have any type, `x[4]` and `x[5]` must have the same type. This kind of array whilst uncommon in Python is extremely common in array languages. Array languages tend to have a lot of vector operators (and so therefore are very competitive users of the AVS512 instruction set) which tend to be very fast. Programmers of array languages also tend to avoid things like loops and branches -- indeed you might enjoy http://nsl.com/ if you want to expand your mind a bit on that point.

The second trick is that an interpreter can be made very small. If you can get your entire program and the interpreter into L1 then you do not stall the CPU while your program fetches various parts of itself from memory. This is a trick languages like Fortran and C and C++ don't miss per-se, a very experienced programmer can usually identify the hotspots and optimise the hotpath for these things, but it is very time consuming to do this when your entire program is the hotpath!

That should have been AVX512. I blame autocomplete for the typo and myself for missing it.

That's the first link I found and it says nothing about a benchmark, what's being benchmarked, what languages were used and what the timings were.

Do you actually have anything to show to back up your claim? Anything at all?

> That's the first link I found and it says nothing about a benchmark

Except the first paragraph:

The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite is the industry standard for testing solutions that enable high-speed analytics on time series data, such as tick-by-tick market data (aka "tick database" stacks).

I'm not going to bother any further with such an obvious troll.

Good luck dude. Wish you the best.

So you still can't name the language that won these benchmarks and which other languages it ran against?

Because they're not on the page, so I can only conclude you made this up.

I use butterflies.

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