Comment by kmacdough
8 months ago
Don't optimize for minimum hate, optimize for actionable feedback and ignore the haters. Easier said than done, though.
Remember you don't need comment trolls on your team, and you'll go insane taking them seriously. Focus on piquing the interest of motivated language nerds. I personally would have really appreciated a "look, were still 10x (or whatever) slower than Python, so now I need all the help I can get working on the codegen, etc." This would have given me quick perspective on why this milestone is meaningful.
I agree...
Just a note: we are NOT 10x slower than Python. I think a lot of people got the wrong message from this thread. HVM is actually quite fast already. It is just that, on this specific program, Python was doing no allocations, while HVM was allocating a lot.
If you compare programs that do the same allocation, HVM already outperforms not just Python but even compiled languages like Haskell/GHC, due to using all cores. See the Bitonic Sort example. And that's extremely relevant, because real world programs in high-level languages allocate a lot!
I think I made a huge mistake of using a "sum" example on the GUIDE, since it is actually one of the few specific programs where HVM will do poorly today.
If you wanna be really honest you write one short example where HVM is weak and one where it's strong, use the opportunity to explain why if you want
That is actually an amazing idea. I'll adopt it.