Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Travis Boucher wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Today that reality is very visible already from certain spots. I've
recently switched fields from machine learning/nlp research to
web/industry. Although the fields are apparently very different, they
have a lot in common, along with the simple adage that obsession with
performance is a survival skill that (according to all trend
extrapolations I could gather) is projected to become more, not less,
important.
Andrei
Except in the web world performance is network and parallelism (cloud
computing). Much less code efficiency, much more programmer
productivity (which currently is mutually exclusive, but doesn't have
to be)
You'd be extremely surprised. With Akamai delivery and enough CPUs, it
really boils down to sheer code optimization. Studies have shown that
artificially inserted delays on the order of tens/hundreds of
milliseconds influence user behavior on the site dramatically.
Andrei
This is one thing that doesn't surprise me. Even some large sites, when
given a choice between a fast language with slower development (C/C++)
and a slow language with fast development (Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP), the
choice is almost always the fast development.
Sure, there are a few people who work on making the lower level stuff
faster (mostly network load optimization), but the majority of the
optimization is making the code run on a cluster of machines. A site
falls into 2 categories. Needs scalability and doesn't.
Those who need scalability, design frameworks that scale. Need more
speed? Add more machines.
Those who don't need scalability, don't care what they write in or how
slow their crap is (you don't know how often I've seen horrid SQL
queries that cause full table scans).
The fast, highly optimized web code is a very niche market.
