Walter's DConf 2014 Talks - Topics in Finance

[w0rp]

On Friday, 21 March 2014 at 21:30:29 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Heh, right before I read this, I stumbled across this snippet 
> from Miguel De Icaza's blog from a couple months back, where he 
> regretted using C++ to build Moonlight, their Silverlight 
> implementation:
>
> "But this would not be a Saturday blog post without pointing 
> out that Cairo's C-based API is easier and simpler to use than 
> many of those C++ libraries out there. The more sophisticated 
> the use of the C++ language to get some performance benefit, 
> the more unpleasant the API is to use.
>
> The incredibly powerful Antigrain sports an insanely fast 
> software renderer and also a quite hostile template-based API.
>
> We got to compare Antigrain and Cairo back when we worked on 
> Moonlight. Cairo was the clear winner.
>
> We built Moonlight in C++ for all the wrong reasons ("better 
> performance", "memory usage") and was a decision we came to 
> regret. Not only were the reasons wrong, it is not clear we got 
> any performance benefit and it is clear that we did worse with 
> memory usage.
>
> But that is a story for another time."
> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Jan-04.html

That is a really strange argument. Let's break it down into 
stages.

1. Use C++ for better performance.
2. Find C++ library with better performance, but it's ugly.
3. Use C library in C++ instead because it's less ugly.
4. Conclude that C++ can't deliver better performance.

That is really weak. This is why the industry needs salvation 
from C++ with D. It would mostly be then, "Oh it has better 
performance with these template things... and it's not a pain in 
the ass to use."