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Comment by vrmiguel | Hacker News Reader

That's true, you never mentioned Python or alternatives in your README, I guess I got Mandela'ed from the comments in Hacker News, so my bad on that.

People are naturally going to compare the timings and function you cite to what's available to the community right now, though, that's the only way we can picture its performance in real-life tasks.

> Mojo or other languages, specifically because it generates hate

Mojo launched comparing itself to Python and didn't generate much hate, it seems, but I digress

In any case, I hope Bend and HVM can continue to improve even further, it's always nice to see projects like those, specially from another Brazilian

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Thanks, and I apologize if I got defensive, it is just that I put so much effort on being truthful, double-checking, putting disclaimers everywhere about every possible misinterpretation. Hell this is behind install instructions:

> our code gen is still on its infancy, and is nowhere as mature as SOTA compilers like GCC and GHC

Yet people still misinterpret. It is frustrating because I don't know what I could've done better

Don't worry about it. Keep at it, this is a very cool project.

FWIW on HN people are inherently going to try to actually use your project and so if it's meant to be (long term) a faster way to run X people evaluate it against that implicit benchmark.

Introducing novel ideas and making strong statements will almost always generate some anger and denial.

https://paulgraham.com/useful.html

Don't optimize for minimum hate, optimize for actionable feedback and ignore the haters. Easier said than done, though.

Remember you don't need comment trolls on your team, and you'll go insane taking them seriously. Focus on piquing the interest of motivated language nerds. I personally would have really appreciated a "look, were still 10x (or whatever) slower than Python, so now I need all the help I can get working on the codegen, etc." This would have given me quick perspective on why this milestone is meaningful.

I agree...

Just a note: we are NOT 10x slower than Python. I think a lot of people got the wrong message from this thread. HVM is actually quite fast already. It is just that, on this specific program, Python was doing no allocations, while HVM was allocating a lot.

If you compare programs that do the same allocation, HVM already outperforms not just Python but even compiled languages like Haskell/GHC, due to using all cores. See the Bitonic Sort example. And that's extremely relevant, because real world programs in high-level languages allocate a lot!

I think I made a huge mistake of using a "sum" example on the GUIDE, since it is actually one of the few specific programs where HVM will do poorly today.

If you wanna be really honest you write one short example where HVM is weak and one where it's strong, use the opportunity to explain why if you want

That is actually an amazing idea. I'll adopt it.

I think the (hidden) reasoning is that it is really easy to have speedups with slow interpreters. However, getting speedups in high-performance level programs is quite hard, mainly due to micro-optimisations.

That's where the comparison to Python comes from: getting speedup on slow interpreters is not very _relevant_. Now if your interpreter has the same optimisations as Python (or v8 or JVM), even a small fraction of what you show would be impressive.

Having said this, the work your team did is a really challenging engineering feat (and with lot more potential). But I do not believe the current speedups will hold if the interpreter/compilers have the level of optimisation that exist in other languages. And while you do not claim it, people expect that.

Perhaps consider moving the warning in the NOTE at the bottom of the README.md to a DISCLAIMER section near the top.

I read the whole thing first, then commented, but people often read half of such a document, assume they've got all the important bits, and dive straight in.

(we used to have that problem at $work with new team members and our onboarding doc; I added a section at the bottom that was pure silliness, and then started asking people who claimed to have read it a question that would only make sense if they'd seen the joke ... generally followed by telling them to go back and finish reading and not to try that with me again ;)

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