From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-07-28T22:49:29+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C - Part 2, comparing C, Ruby and Java

Peter Hickman wrote:
> There you have it, C is still faster by an order of magnitude. 
> Performance is yours for the asking, but it comes at a price - you 
> have to write it in C. Ease of development also comes at a price, you 
> don't get the same performance as C. Of course if you have a fear of C 
> this does show that you can go some of the way by converting to Java, 
> if that is fast enough for you then well and good but know this, C is 
> faster.
In my younger days, I did a lot of development in assembler languages, 
and for many years my main high-level language was FORTRAN. Towards the 
end of my FORTRAN days (about 1990) I was still dropping into assembler 
for speed, even though the (FORTRAN) compilers were quite good by that 
time. C compilers really sucked, especially for numerical applications.

Now here's where I'm going to put on my asbestos suit. I think the 
difficulty of C development is *vastly* exaggerated by the fans of 
"dynamic/scripting/interpreted" languages! In addition, I think the 
difficulty of *assembler* development is vastly exaggerated, except in 
bizarre architectures. (Of course, x86 does border on bizarre, until you 
get to 64-bit addressing). :)

So what is the source of "fear of C?"