[Melbourne-pm] Still performing well..

[Daniel Pittman]

Sam Watkins <sam at nipl.net> writes:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 03:20:28PM +1000, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> Well, not entirely: I just think it will make the performance curve of your
>> application look poor once it gets asked to process a 4GB CSV file, while
>> languages that do free unused memory will do a little better. :)
>
> Well it depends whether you actually need to keep all the data in memory.

That is a fair point. :)

[...]

> Stream processing is a different thing.  Nicely written C performs much
> better than any interpreted language or bytecode/JIT language for both
> stream processing and loading.

Well, generally.  Hand-tuned assembly code often beats the portable assembly
of C at the same job, too.  I don't know I would stick with the statement
forever, though, especially if the stream processing was complex and had many
decision points.

> I don't know of any compiled language that performs better than well-written
> C for many cases, because C is close to the metal, and allows the programmer
> to do things their own way.

...and, just to check here, you are only counting "C that is written well",
not "C in the hands of a random programmer", right?


> For example with stream processing, I commonly use a single resizable buffer
> for each line, so there is no need to free anything inside the loop.  You
> said that I am cheating by not freeing anything, but if I write my C (or
> brace) code well, there is no need to malloc or free anything except perhaps
> a single line buffer, and maybe realloc it a couple times if it started off
> too small.

Yeah, and your VM language is going to do the same thing: use a static buffer,
get static buffer performance.  Witness, for example, Perl. :)

> Going nuts with malloc and free for every field in a file is almost always a
> bad way to program in C.  In Java, perl, python, etc., you really have
> little or no choice about that, there's no nice way to do it as efficiently
> as in C, you need to use an object / buffer for each string.

Nonsense:

  my $x = '.' x 10000;    # preallocate
  sysread(FH, $x, 5000);  # ...and use that storage

Feel free to verify my claims, if you wish. :)

        Daniel

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