In my experience, languages like Ruby and Python are slower than languages like Javascript, which are slower than languages like C#/Java, which are slower than languages like C++/Rust, which are slower than languages like C and Fortran. Assembly isn't always the fastest approach these days, but well-placed assembly can blow C out of the water too.
The ease of use and maintainability scale in reverse in my experience, though. I wouldn't want to maintain the equivalent of a quick and dirty RoR server reimplemented in C or assembly, especially after it's grown organically for a few years. Writing Rust can be very annoying when you can't take the normal programming shortcuts because of lifetimes or the borrow checker, in a way that JIT'ed languages allow.
Everything is a scale and faster does not necessarily mean better if the code becomes unreadable.
Right, but then I'd have to write C++. Shallow dismissal aside (I really do not enjoy writing C++), the bigger issue is safety: I am almost certain to write several exploitable bugs in a language like C++ were I to use it to build an internet-facing web app. The likelihood of that happening with Rust, Java, C#, or any other memory-safe language is much lower. Sure, logic errors can result in security issues too, and no language can save you from those, but that's in part the point: when it comes to the possibility of logic errors, we're in "all things being equal" territory. When it comes to memory safety, we very much are not.
So that pretty much leaves me with Rust, if I've decided that the memory footprint or performance of Java or C# isn't sufficient for my needs. (Or something like Go, but I personally do not enjoy writing Go, so I wouldn't choose it.)
> Everything is a scale and faster does not necessarily mean better if the code becomes unreadable.
True, but unreadable-over-time has not been my experience with Rust. You can write some very plain-vanilla, not-"cleverly"-optimized code in Rust, and still have great performance characteristics. If I ever have to drop into 'unsafe' in a Rust code base for something like a web app, most likely I'm doing it wrong.
Even the basics, nobody is calling Rust's [T]::sort_unstable without knowing it is an unstable sort. Even if you've no idea what "stability" means in this context you are cued to go find out. But in C++ that is just called "sort". Hope you don't mind that it's unstable...
[Edited because I can't remember the correct order of words apparently.]
Very well summed. I'll remember this exact quote. Thank you.
You probably want the apples-to-apples comparison but this looks an artificially limiting comparison; people are shilling, ahem, sorry, advocating for their languages in most areas, especially web / API servers. If somebody is making grandiose claims about their pet language then it's very fair to slap them with C++ or Rust or anything else that's actually mega ultra fast.
So there's no "better" comparison here. It's a fair game to compare everything to everything if people use all languages for the same kinds of tasks. And they do.
perhaps you get 1300MB to 20 MB with C# or Java or go, and 13MB with rust . Rust’s design is not the reason for bulk of the reduction is the point
“Less languages features, but a better compiler” was originally the aspirational selling point of Go.
And even though there were some hiccups, at least 10 years ago, I remember that mainly being true for typical web servers. Go programs did tend to use less memory, have less GC pauses (in the context of a normal api web server), and faster startup time.
But I know Java has put a ton of work in to catch up to Go. So I wonder if that’s still true today?
Are you hiring developers that are 100% fully conscious of concurrency and starvation or people that are only concerned with rest and vest and TC?
For either case Go is better.
* For people that are aware of concurrency, they will select Go because they appreciate its out-of-the-box preemptive concurrency model with work stealing.
* For people that are not aware of concurrency, then you should definitely use Go because they are not qualified to safely use anything else.
I remember this being true 10 years ago. Java web servers I maintained had a huge problem with tail latency. Maybe if you were working on a 1 qps service it didn’t matter. But for those of us working on high qps systems, this was a huge problem.
But like I said, I know the Java people have put a ton of work in to try to close the gap with Go. So maybe this isn’t true anymore.
A faster compiler was the aspirational selling point. As legend has it, Go was conceived while waiting for a C++ program to compile.
Before what was called "Go 2" transitioned the project away from Google and into community direction there was some talk of adding no more features, instead focusing on improving the compiler... But since the community transition took place, the community has shown that they'd rather have new features.
The "Go 1" project is no longer with us (at least publicly; perhaps it lives on inside Google?)
I don’t think Java has any edge when it comes to deployment.
Also you can do that same thing in Rust or C++ too. Very common in C++, speeds up programs quite a bit.
CoreCLR itself doesn't take much memory - GC might decide on a large heap size however. Do give .NET 9 a try with Server GC which has enabled DATAS by default. It prioritizes smaller memory footprint much more heavily and uses a much more advanced tuning algorithm to balance out memory consumption, allocation throughput and % of time spent in GC.
