Timeline for Why are some programming languages "faster" or "slower" than others?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
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| May 4, 2018 at 13:40 | comment | added | Cubic | "Microsoft probably employs more people making coffee for their compiler programmers than the entire PHP, Ruby, and Python community combined has people working on their VMs" I suppose that depends on how far you're willing to stretch the term "compiler programmer" and how much you're including with that (Microsoft develops a lot of compilers). For example, just the VS C++ compiler team is relatively small AFAIK. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 22:24 | comment | added | Michael Kay | I would disagree with the comment about resources. It's not the number of people on the team that matters, it's the skill level of the best people on the team. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 21:59 | comment | added | Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen | C has a history - it was created to make a system written in assembly language portable to other systems. So the original purpose was to provide a "portable assembler" for Unix, and was very well designed. It did so well from 1980-1995-ish that it had critical mass when Windows 95 came around. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 1:50 | comment | added | gmatht |
While technically languages are not inherently fast, some languages have a greater focus on allowing the programmer to make fast code. C is primarily optimised to CPUs rather than the other way round. For example, C chose fixed size ints for performance reasons, despite the fact that unbounded integers such as those used by Python are much more mathematically natural. Implementing unbounded integers in hardware wouldn't be as fast as fixed sized integers. Languages that try to hide implementation details need complex optimisations to come close to naive C implementations.
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| Mar 24, 2017 at 21:50 | history | answered | Jörg W Mittag | CC BY-SA 3.0 |