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Comment by victorbjorklund | Hacker News Reader

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victorbjorklund·

Can someone explain how it can be "faster" than anything else?

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I think he's referring to the trillion-row regime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40522433

My money is on "it's not, and the benchmarks are cherry picked"

I mean faster at filtering data than a python script? Sure. Faster than a database or hand-rolled C code? Only if your benchmarks are misleading.

Not for all cases, but he (and his team) take the time to squeeze performance out of things where others just say 'it's fast enough'. There was a monh+ long conversation why all most used json parsers are so terribly slow etc. Not many people take the time to try to optimise the last drop of blood out of everything, especially if you have shareholders or deadlines; you settle for 'good enough'.

And to be clear, in many, if not most cases, settling for "good enough" is the right call, and spending hours upon hours chasing performance is the wrong call.

Sure, but not in the case of maximising performance if that is your goal. Which is what we are talking about here… wringing every ounce of overhead from it is basically the business case; at least one of them.

Oh sure. Just wanted to stress that that's seldom the case. I see so many cases of wasted optimizations because someone thought performance mattered, leading to unnecessarily complex code or other maintenance issues.

In other cases, especially in my sector, it's simply that the customer values lower cost over absolute performance.

Of course, not saying you shouldn't be mindful of introducing an O(n^2) algorithm when an O(n log n) can trivially be used, or similar.

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