On Sunday, 25 August 2013 at 22:00:23 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/21/2013 9:50 AM, Ramon wrote:
I am *not* against keeping an eye on performance, by no means.
Looking at
Moore's law, however, and at the kind of computing power
available nowadays even
in smartphones, not to talk about 8 and 12 core PCs, I feel
that the importance
of performance is way overestimated (possibly following a
formertimes justified
tradition).
While a 5% performance boost is not relevant for consumer apps,
it can make an enormous difference for server side apps. For
example, if you've got a $100m server farm, 5% means you save
$5m, and server farms can be much, much bigger than that.
You are, of course, perfectly right and my professional
background would testify you to be correct.
But I didn't argue "performance is evil" - my point is
"performance vs. realiability" and that it may quite well be a
problem to favour performance too much.
performance is desirable, no doubt. But reliability is a conditio
sine qua non in some environments.
To rephrase it: Thank you, Walter Bright, for giving us not only
a performant language but one that also offers some very welcome
mechanism to support reliability/safety.
