Comment by switchbak
8 hours ago
Yes, I remember those too. The costs of manual memory management were real and were not low.
But costs on the cloud are real too, especially now. I’ve been living in JVM land for a very long time, but now it’s especially clear how important lean services are. Especially now that the bar for writing lean code is so much lower: let the borrow checker figure it out, etc.
I just spent a couple days wringing out more performance/memory efficiency for our services. Nice gains to be sure, but it’s still so immensely wasteful compared to something well written running native. If it was my money, I’d be going native for sure.
> But costs on the cloud are real too, especially now. I’ve been living in JVM land for a very long time, but now it’s especially clear how important lean services are. Especially now that the bar for writing lean code is so much lower: let the borrow checker figure it out, etc.
I don't think even Cloudflare bothers with this waste of time. If they did, they would certainly not have built their global infrastructure on JavaScript running on V8. They'd have done what Google and old-time Facebook did and built their whole infrastructure on low-level system languages, and hiring the world's leading minds on the subject to milk the last drop of performance from their hardware.
Even Google stopped to look at the problem and came up with Go. Not V8.