From: Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohalpin@...>
Date: 2006-07-27T00:01:11+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C

On 7/26/06, Charles O Nutter <headius@headius.com> wrote:

> there's nothing about a
> language's design that should necessitate it being slower than any other
> language.

While I accept that you shouldn't confuse a language with its implementation,
I find that a mildly surprising statement, especially since you said
in an earlier post:

> for memory-intensive situations Java almost always wins because lazy memory
> management allows work to get done first, faster

Garbage collection seems to me to be an integral part of Java's design.

Off the top of my head, I can think of some other design aspects that
have an effect on performance: method lookup in OO languages, scoping,
continuations, closures, static vs dynamic typing, type inference,
double dispatch, consing + car + cdr in Lisp, direct vs indirect
threading in Forth, etc. These are not just matters of implementation.
Each is a language design decision with a semantic effect which incurs
or avoids a computational cost, regardless of how it's actually
implemented. For example, Ruby has real closures, Python doesn't. I
don't see how you could ever reduce the cost of Ruby having closures
to zero - the memory alone is an implied overhead. Sure you can
optimize till the cows come home but different functionalities have
different costs and you can't ever avoid that.

Regards,
Sean