Comment by thesz
6 days ago
From the topic starter: "I've posted a graph showing nearly 9000 microbenchmarks of Fil-C vs. clang on cryptographic software (each run pinned to 1 core on the same Zen 4). Typically code compiled with Fil-C takes between 1x and 4x as many cycles as the same code compiled with clang"
Thus, Fil-C compiled code is 1 to 4 times as slow as plain C. This is not in the "significantly slower" ballpark, like where most interpreters are. The ROOT C/C++ interpreter is 20+ times slower than binary code, for example.
Cryptographic software is probably close to a best case scenario since there is very little memory management involved and runtime is dominated by computation in tight loops. As long as Fil-C is able to avoid doing anything expensive in the inner loops you get good performance.
This describes most C programs and many, if not most, C++ programs. Basically, this is how C/C++ code is being written, by avoiding memory management, especially in tight loops.
This depends heavily on what problem domain you're talking about. For example, a DBMS is necessarily going to shuffle a lot of data into and out of memory.
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Along with the sibling comment, microbenchmarks should not be used as authoritative data when the use case is full applications. For that matter, highly optimized Java or Go may be "1 to 4 times as slow as plain C". Fil-C has its merits, but they should be described carefully, just with any technology.
I replied to unwarranted (to my eye) call that Fil-C is significantly slower than plain C.
Fil-C has its drawbacks, but they should be described carefully, just with any technology.
I maintain that microbenchmarks are not convincing, but you have a fair point that GP's statement is unfounded, and now I've made a reply to GP to that effect.
Or JavaScript for that matter
What does "significantly" mean to you? To my ear, "significantly" means "statistically significant".