Accidentally quadratic: When Python is faster than C++

• rapidyaml

  13 517 5.7 C++

  Rapid YAML - a library to parse and emit YAML, and do it fast.

Leading to eye-rolling problems like these: https://github.com/biojppm/rapidyaml/issues/40

• flang

  4 779 7.0 C

  Flang is a Fortran language front-end designed for integration with LLVM.

  

I feel like the would have to, if they were to produce a remotely competitive compiler. That's why I'm hoping NVidia's Flang[1] efforts will lead to this aspect of LLVM being cleaned up.

[1]: https://github.com/flang-compiler/flang

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• text-unicode

  2 69 0.0 TypeScript

  Unicode text OT implementation

  

Well said.

I've had a lot of conversations with javascript engineers over the years who've argued to me that well tuned JS will be nearly as fast as the equivalent C code. I've written plenty of little toy benchmarks over the years, and in my experience they're partly right. Well written JS code in V8 can certainly run fast - sometimes around half the speed of C code. But a massive performance gap opens up when you use nontrivial data structures. Nested fields, non-uniform arrays, trees, and so on will all cripple javascript's performance when compared to C's equivalent of simply embedding nested structs. If you couple clean C data structures with allocation-free hot paths from arenas, the performance of C will easily hit 10-20x the performance of the equivalent JS code.

From memory my plain text based operational transform code does ~800k transforms / second in javascript. The equivalent C code does 20M/second. The C implementation is about twice as many lines of code as the JS version though.

(The code in question: https://github.com/ottypes/text-unicode/blob/master/lib/type... / https://github.com/ottypes/libot )

• Vrmac

  45 104 3.6 C#

  Vrmac Graphics, a cross-platform graphics library for .NET. Supports 3D, 2D, and accelerated video playback. Works on Windows 10 and Raspberry Pi4.

My Linux video player library https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo#per... uses CPU on par with VLC, and 20% less RAM.

• JitFromScratch

  1 161 1.2 C++

  Discontinued Example project from my talks in the LLVM Social Berlin and C++ User Group

• ctl

  19 1,050 0.0 C

  The C Template Library

This seems oriented around just code bases you have seen personally rather than fundamental C limitations and so misleads. To clarify: C can do template-like macros for type specialization (and this is common in some code bases) and easier to debug ways [1] { I've personally used a variant of [1] techniques since the mid 90s }. C can do setjmp & longjmp exceptions and you can even do a TRY/CATCH like exception macros. Function pointers are in stdlib interfaces (e.g. qsort) and generally pretty common in C code. I believe gcc has been able to inline through C function pointers ("de-virtualize", though you qualify with "really" there..so not sure) in the same translation unit for like 2 decades now with the right compiler flags/annotations.

It is true that C cannot do full template meta-programming or certain state save/restore optimizations faster than setjmp/longjmp. Hard/painful/trivial are all a bit more subjective and relative to exposure/practice/training/etc.

Personally, I think Nim [2] is a much friendlier way to go than either C++ or Python without the pitfalls of either, but the ecosystem is admittedly much smaller.

[1] https://github.com/glouw/ctl/

[2] https://nim-lang.org

• dmd

  146 2,888 9.9 D

  dmd D Programming Language compiler

  

> But isn't that a consequence of D "mimicking" C to some extent?

It's true that multi-language backends will inevitably cater to the semantics of the dominant language.

For a related example, I discovered that gdb doesn't pay much attention to the DWARF symbolic debug spec. It pays attention to the particular way gcc generates symbolic debug info. Other patterns, while compatible with the spec, don't work with gdb. Similar problems have happened with linkers.

It's a matter of "do as I do, not as I say".

Since I am the author of DMD's backend, I've been putting in optimizations that do cater to D, rather than just C and C++. For example, in the last few days I started putting in optimizations to take advantage of D's new "bottom" type:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12245

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• llvm-project

  349 25,451 10.0 C++

  The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.

  

> But .NET isn't?

Indeed.

.NET runtime takes about 30 MB, or 50 MB if you're on Windows and need desktop components. Links there: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/5.0

clang+llvm package takes 300-400 MB, that's almost an order of magnitude difference: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/tag/llvmorg-11...

Suggest a related project