Walter's DConf 2014 Talks - Topics in Finance

TJB broughtj at gmail.com
Fri Mar 21 14:45:56 PDT 2014


On Friday, 21 March 2014 at 21:39:54 UTC, w0rp wrote:
> 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."

The removal of pain points is indeed, in my mind, the main issue. 
:-)


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