OT (partially): about promotion of integers

bearophile bearophileHUGS at lycos.com
Wed Dec 12 14:17:47 PST 2012


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


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