Walter Bright:
Consider running a server farm. If you can make your code 5%
faster, you need 5% fewer servers. That translates into
millions of dollars.
Two comments:
- I've seen Facebook start from PHP, go to PHP compiled in some
ways, and lately start to switch to faster languages, so when you
have tons of servers space and electricity used by CPUs becomes
important for the bottom line. On the other hand on similar
servers lot of other people use languages where there is far more
than your 5% overhead, as Java. Often small performance
differences are not more important than several other
considerations, like coding speed, how much easy is to find
programmer, how cheap those programmers are, etc, even on server
farms.
- If your code is buggy (because of overflows, or other causes),
its output can be worthless or even harmful. This is why some
people are using OcaML for high-speed trading (I have given two
links in a precedent post), where bugs risk being quite costly.
Bye,
bearophile
