Adding Java and C++ to the MQTT benchmarks or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Garbage Collector

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 22:02:48 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 19:16:10 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Every time I see such discussions, it reminds me when I 
>> started coding in the mid-80s and the heresy of using 
>> languages like Pascal and C dialects for microcomputers, 
>> instead of coding everything in Assembly or Forth
>
> If you insist on bringing up heresy...
>
> Motorola 680xx is pretty nice compared to x86, although the 
> AMD64bit mode is better than it was. 680xx feels almost like C, 
> just better ;9, I think only MIPS is close in programmer 
> friendlieness.  Forth is nice too, very minimalistic and quite 
> powerful for the simplistic implementation. I had a Forth64 
> module for my C64 to dabble with, a bit hard to create more 
> than toy programs in Forth... Postscript is pretty close 
> actually, and clean. But Forth is dense, so dense that you 
> don't edit text files, you edit text screens...  But don't diss 
> assembly, try to get more than 8 sprites and move sprites into 
> the screen border without assembly, can't be done! High level 
> languages, my ass, BASIC can't do that!
>
> But hey, I am not arguing in favour of Forth and C (although I 
> would argue in favour of 680xx and MIPS). I am arguing in 
> favour of smart compilers that allow you to go low level at the 
> top of the call stack where it matters (inner loops) without 
> having to resort to a different language. D is close to that, 
> so it is a promising candidate.
>
> And... I actually think D is too lax in some areas. I don't 
> think you should be allowed to call C/C++ without nailing down 
> the pre/postconditions, basically describing what happens in 
> terms of optimization constraints. I also want the programmer 
> to be able to assert facts that the compiler fail to prove so 
> that it can be used for optimization. Basically the ability to 
> guide the optimizer so you don't have to resort to low level 
> coding. I also think giving access to malloc is a bad idea. :-P
>
> And well, I am not new to GC, I have actually used Simula quite 
> a bit in classes/teaching newbies. Simula incidentally has 
> exactly the same Garbage Collector that D has AFAIK.  I 
> remember we had a 1970s internal memo describing the garbage 
> collector of Simula on the curriculum of the compiler course... 
> So that is veeeery old news.
>
> Actually Simula kinda has the same kind of string type 
> representation that D has too. And OO. And it has coroutines… 
> While it doesn't have templates, it does actually have name 
> parameters that has textual substitution semantics (in addition 
> to ref and value). Now I also kinda like that it has ":-" for 
> reference assignment and ":=" for value assignment, but I 
> didn't like it back then.
>
> 45 years later D merge Simula semantics with C (and some more 
> stuff). And that is an interesting thing, of course.
>
> But hey, no point in pretending that other people don't know 
> what programming a GC high level language entails. If I want 
> low latency, I go to C/C++ and hopefully D. If I want high 
> level productivity I use whatever fits the bill… all GC 
> languages. But I don't think D should be the first option in 
> any non-speed area yet, so the GC is of limited use for now 
> IMO. (In clusters you might want that though, speed+convenience 
> but no need for low latency.)
>
> I think D could pick up more good stuff from Python, like the 
> array closures that allows you to succinctly transform arrays. 
> Makes large portions of Python's standard library pointless.
>
> What I really like about D is that the front end code appears 
> to be quite readable. Take a look at clang and you will see the 
> difference. So, I guess anyone with C++ knowledge has the 
> opportunity to tune both syntax and semantics to their own 
> liking and share it with others. That's pretty sweet (I'd like 
> to try that one day).


Sorry if I hit any nerve, one never knows the experience of other 
people in the Internet.

It is just that in the enterprise world I have been part of 
projects that ported C and C++ based servers to JVM/.NET ones, 
always with comparable performance.

I do acknowledge that in game programming it might be different, 
however even AAA do play with GC systems nowadays, even if they 
have some issues to optimize their behavior.

For example, The Witcher 2 for the XBox 360.

http://www.makinggames.de/index.php/magazin/2155_porting_the_witcher_2_on_xbox_360

--
Paulo