bokbar's comments

bokbar · on July 14, 2010

Wow, what do you do with your browser that you absolutely need to have a JS performance which is an order of magnitude better than FF 3.6? Just curious...

tsuraan · on July 14, 2010

High performance isn't just about getting stuff done faster, it can also be thought of as getting the same amount done in less CPU time. When I'm running on batteries, my laptop's CPUs are running at 800MHz, and I get about 8-10 hours of battery life. If something's making my computer work, my CPUs go up to 2.4GHz, and my battery life plummets. More efficient javascript engines should be able to do the same work with less battery use, which makes me happy.

GeneralMaximus · on July 14, 2010

  1. Facebook
  2. Google Wave
  3. Google Docs
  4. And a bunch of other webapps I'm forgetting ...

Try out Wave on an older version of Firefox (say, 3.0 or even something from the 2.x branch if you're adventurous). It totally destroys the browser.

Perceval · on July 14, 2010

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

Those few seconds add up.

lispygem · on July 14, 2010

What's up with downvoting? It's a great question, I'm intrigued by adbge performance requirements as well.

bokbar · on July 13, 2010

SRAM uses 6x times more transistors to store the same amount of information, so do your math for a hypothetical "512MB laptop". On the other hand maybe they do exist, did you look?

bokbar · on July 13, 2010

Come to Austin Texas! When I lived there I met quite a few folks who were hacking on some cool hardware in their garages: embedded video analytics, signal processing, etc. Maybe its the "extreme proximity" to giant campuses of IBM/Motorola/Dell that favors a certain flavor of startup ecosystem, not sure...

But thing may have changed since then.

bokbar · on July 13, 2010

True, but I think his post isn't about generalized comparison of programming languages, but rather a pun towards "Its faster because its C" claims. Not that often our software can benefit from exploiting caching, especially in "release often, release early" world of web startups.

tptacek · on July 13, 2010

Not sure you're following: C programs can be optimized to take advantage of caching (or to use a low-overhead allocator, or to use more or less compact representations) in ways high-level languages either retard or disallow altogether. And all software benefits from caching.

I think your real observation is that C level performance just isn't that relevant in scale-horizontal network-bound programs, and I agree with you.