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That's just because there's no a lucene equivalent C library with the same level of attention?
however, there are increasingly such written in C++ (pisa) and rust (tantivy). They handily beat lucene in benchmark suites [1] - so it seems like lucene does suffer from a java penalty - despite getting even more developer attention than pisa and tantivy I would think.
1: https://tantivy-search.github.io/bench/
> it’s not clear if this will be a positive for native dev advocacy
I've rewritten a few things in rust. Seems pretty positive to me, because you can mix some of the best optimizations and data structures you'd write in C, with much better developer ergonomics.
A few years ago I wrote a rope library in C. This is a library for making very fast, arbitrary insert & delete operations in a large string. My C code was about as fast as I could make it at the time. But recently, I took a stab at porting it to Rust to see if I could improve things. Long story short, the rust version is another ~3x faster than the C version.
https://crates.io/crates/jumprope
(Vs in C: https://github.com/josephg/librope )
The competition absolutely isn't fair. In rust, I managed to add another optimization that doesn't exist in the C code. I could add it in C, but it would have been really awkward to weave in. Possible, but awkward in an already very complex bit of C. In rust it was much easier because of the language's ergonomics. In C I'm using lots of complex memory management and I don't want to add complexity in case I add memory corruption bugs. In rust, well, the optimization was entirely safe code.
And as for other languages - I challenge anyone to even approach this level of performance in a non-native language. I'm processing ~30M edit operations per second.
But these sort of performance results probably won't scale for a broader group of programmers. I've seen rust code run slower than equivalent javascript code because the programmers, used to having a GC, just Box<>'ed everything. And all the heap allocations killed performance. If you naively port python line-by-line to rust, you can't expect to magically get 100x the performance.
Its like, if you give a top of the line Porsche to an expert driver, they can absolutely drive faster. But I'm not an expert driver, so I'll probably crash the darn thing. I'd take a simple toyota or something any day. I feel like rust is the porsche, and python is the toyota.
> say, Ada programmers.
I stand summoned.
> Unfortunately, none of them ever seem to show up.
We do from time to time, but people assume our language is dead (it isn't). I learned it last year and I've been very impressed by how simple it is, given the speed you get with it.
It was a "big language" at the time, but now it's a language smaller than Rust or C++ which offers good performance with straightforward syntax.
Ada has inline assembly, easy usage of compiler intrinsics, dead-simple binding to C, built-in multi-tasking (which includes CPU pinning), a good standard library, RAII, and real honest-to-goodness built-in, not-null-terminated strings. It's a compiled language, so you get good speed in general, but the built-in concurrency really does help work which can be split up. Ada 202x is getting even finer grained parallelism (parallel for-loops) in the language itself to even further help this.
- https://learn.adacore.com/
- https://github.com/pyjarrett/programming-with-ada
- https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming
Ada is a bit verbose for my tastes. Nim [1] is fast like C - I have yet to really find anything rewritten in Nim be slower. It's safe-ish like Rust { there is an easily identifiable subset of unsafe constructs }. It's kind of like Ada, but with Lisp-like syntax macros/meta programming and Python-like block indentation (Lisp folks always said they "read by indentation" anyway). Nim also has user definable operators and many other features. Compile times are very small while the stdlib is big-ish.
Small sample statistics, but three or four times now I have re-written Rust in Nim and the Nim ran faster. Once you can do inline assembly/intrinsics in a PL, most "real world" benchmarks reduce to a measure of dev patience/time/energy not the language. They also become "multi-language" solutions (if you count SIMD asm as a language which I think one should). Even slow Python allows C/Cython modules which in the real world are absolutely fair game, and you can call SIMD intrinsics from Cython pretty easily, too. Since we have few ways to quantify dev patience/attention objectively, these "my PL is faster than yours" discussions are usually pretty pointless.
[1] https://nim-lang.org/
There is no reason why you could not, in principle, have Rust-style compile-time borrow checking in a managed language.
As an extreme example (that I have occasionally thought about doing though probably won't), you could fork TypeScript and add ownership and lifetime and inherited-mutability annotations to it, and have the compiler enforce single-ownership and shared-xor-mutable except in code that has specifically opted out of this. As with existing features of TypeScript's type system, this wouldn't affect the emitted code at all—heap allocations would still be freed nondeterministically by the tracing GC at runtime, not necessarily at the particular point in the program where they stop being used—but you'd get the maintainability benefits of not allowing unrestricted aliasing.
(Since you wouldn't have destructors, you might need to use linear instead of affine types, to ensure that programmers can't forget to call a resource object's cleanup method when they're done with it. Alternatively, you could require https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen... to be used, once that gets added to JavaScript.)
Of course, if you design a runtime specifically to be targeted by such a language, more becomes possible. See https://without.boats/blog/revisiting-a-smaller-rust/ for one sketch of what this might look like.
There is no reason why you could not, in principle, have Rust-style compile-time borrow checking in a managed language.
As an extreme example (that I have occasionally thought about doing though probably won't), you could fork TypeScript and add ownership and lifetime and inherited-mutability annotations to it, and have the compiler enforce single-ownership and shared-xor-mutable except in code that has specifically opted out of this. As with existing features of TypeScript's type system, this wouldn't affect the emitted code at all—heap allocations would still be freed nondeterministically by the tracing GC at runtime, not necessarily at the particular point in the program where they stop being used—but you'd get the maintainability benefits of not allowing unrestricted aliasing.
(Since you wouldn't have destructors, you might need to use linear instead of affine types, to ensure that programmers can't forget to call a resource object's cleanup method when they're done with it. Alternatively, you could require https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen... to be used, once that gets added to JavaScript.)
Of course, if you design a runtime specifically to be targeted by such a language, more becomes possible. See https://without.boats/blog/revisiting-a-smaller-rust/ for one sketch of what this might look like.
> unless you're doing fun patterns like 'where TComparer : IEqualityComparer,struct`
These fun patterns are precisely generic type constraints I mentioned in my comment. I do use them when performance matters, here’s an open-source example: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/1.2/Vrmac/Draw/Main/I... That code is from a 2D vector graphics library, the uploadIndices() function may be called at 10 kHz frequency or more. Displays are often 60 Hz, that function is called 1-2 times for every vector path being rendered.
> If you poke around at the internals of System.Linq you'll see there's a lot of checking to use specialized types depending on the collection in order to minimize costs.
Linq is awesome, but I’m pretty sure it was designed for usability first, performance second. I tend to avoid Linq (and dynamic memory allocations in general; delegates are using the heap) on performance-critical paths. YMMV but in most of the code I write, these performance-critical paths are taking way under 50% of my code bases.
> 'new' generic constraint is definitely not zero cost
If you mean the overhead of Activator.CreateInstance when generic code calls new() with the generic type, I’m not 100% certain but I think it’s fixed now. According to https://source.dot.net/, that standard library method is marked with [Intrinsic] attribute, the runtime and JIT probably have optimizations for value types.