Comment by einpoklum

3 years ago

> Fortran is significantly faster than C, for instance.

That's news to me. Languages that are close enough to the hardware and allow for inline assembly can probably never be described as slow overall. Perhaps the author refers to some specific libraries?

> Java is the most recent popular general-purpose language

This post was written in 2022. Does the author not know about Python? Javascript? Rust? C#? and a bunch of others?

Weird.

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einpoklum

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flohofwoe  3 years ago

> Fortran is significantly faster than C, for instance.

AFAIK the main reason is pointer aliasing, e.g. you may need to sprinkle C code with the restrict keyword to work around the issue. "Significantly faster" is debatable of course, I bet it's possible both in Fortran and C to write code that performans equally bad.

  • einpoklum  3 years ago

    So you're saying that the aliasing defaults of C are an issue. Well... I suppose, but - not `restrict`ing your pointers in the hottest part of the code is a bit like not compiling with optimizations on.

    • flohofwoe  3 years ago

      Yes, in the end it's just a regular optimization issue, check the compiler output, tweak the code, rinse-repeat...

mark_undoio  3 years ago

>> Java is the most recent popular general-purpose language > This post was written in 2022. Does the author not know about Python? Javascript? Rust? C#? and a bunch of others?

I had to double check this - but Python is several years older than Java. Wikipedia lists 1991 for its first release, vs 1995 for Java.

That said, I felt like Python became really well-known much later than Java (which had massive hype and enthusiasm in the 90s) - so I do actually agree with you listing it here.

capableweb  3 years ago

> > Java is the most recent popular general-purpose language

> This post was written in 2022. Does the author not know about Python? Javascript? Rust? C#? and a bunch of others?

Maybe it's phrased weirdly, but Java is hugely popular and widely deployed, it's hard to argue against that.

As one data point, here is comparing Java, Python, JavaScript, C# and Rust on Google Trends:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=31&date=all&q=J...

Unsurprisingly, Java is still the most searched term in the "Programming" category. JavaScript is catching up, but still have some way to go. Rust barely registers.

Worth keeping in mind is that what's popular in startup circles (like I'm guessing a lot of HN users come from) isn't what's popular in the 90% other types of businesses.

otabdeveloper4  3 years ago

Rust isn't popular, C# isn't general-purpose and the other two are older than Java.