> Performance approaching that of statically-typed languages like C
I might have to give this a try. Is there any language other than assembly that can beat the performance of C?
I might have to give this a try. Is there any language other than assembly that can beat the performance of C?
On modern hardware, you will struggle to write large programs that have decent performance in C. It lacks a bunch of obvious intrinsics - things the hardware can trivially do, but which you can't really express in C, and so you end up maybe writing a bunch of macros to try to persuade your C compiler to emit the desired machine instructions. Now your code is harder to maintain, either you encapsulate all this, losing performance, or it gets very difficult to write more of the software and while your notional "performance" is good for the parts that work, the system as a whole doesn't work, so you don't have any performance.
Languages like C++ and Rust provide better intrinsics which means that actual human programmers can write the more sophisticated program that would technically be possible and just as fast in C except you'd never have written it.
As an extreme end of what's possible, WUFFS has much faster image codecs than are available as C libraries. But, WUFFS is under the hood just a transpiler, the output of WUFFS-the-language is horrible spaghetti C. So, in theory a human programmer could have written say, a C PNG decoder that's just as fast as the one in WUFFS-the-library, after all the C code is in theory code a human (a completely insane human) could write. But humans wouldn't do that because unlike the machine they can't keep a thousand step proof of correctness in their heads and be quite sure that variable can't overflow, they'd chicken out and write the overflow check and lose performance.
As a wild example of that - just the other day I heard about BOLT in a podcast. It optimises the performance of LLVM/GCC binaries by moving around the object code after compilation. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-Lan...
But vanilla C/C++ is already obsolete for performance - if you're writing high performance code it needs to be in CUDA, or some language / library that compiles down to CUDA.