Ask HN: What startups write C heavily?
Just curious.
I wrote a system the has to handle 4 Billion transactions a day and a peak of 45,000 per second. And has to respond in 10ms or else the results of the transaction are discarded.
I wrote it in PHP so it would be easier for my team to maintain but it would not scale beyond 4,500qps then I re-wrote it in C as an apache module and it now scales to 25,000qps per server.
Sometimes you just have to write stuff in C. I've been writing in C for 28 years. I write other languages as often as I can but once in a while I have to go back to C to get something done. Right tool for the right job!
But it looks completely different from C:
---- C example ----
int main(int argc,char argv){ int i; for(i=0;i<argc;i++) printf("argv[%d]=%s\n",i,argv[i]); return 0; }
---- VHDL example (from de.wikipedia) ----
ENTITY DFlipflop IS
PORT(D,Clk: IN Bit;
Q: OUT Bit);
END DFlipflop;
ARCHITECTURE Behav OF DFlipflop IS
CONSTANT T_Clk_Q: time := 4.23 ns;
BEGIN
PROCESS
BEGIN
WAIT UNTIL Clk'EVENT AND Clk='1';
Q <= D AFTER T_Clk_Q;
END PROCESS;
END Behav;