Ditto. My C# code routinely gets close to native C performance whenever I get 
around to benchmarking it, which is not often these days. And I can actually 
write code that runs safely on my 8 cores or on my teraflop GPU if I really 
need the speed.

But as I said, I really don't think this is the place. I hate seeing posts like 
that pass without response but I think I've said more than enough on the 
subject. The hazards of https://xkcd.com/386/ are ever-present.

Regards
David M Bennett FACS

Andl - A New Database Language - andl.org

-----Original Message-----
From: sqlite-users-bounces at mailinglists.sqlite.org 
[mailto:sqlite-users-boun...@mailinglists.sqlite.org] On Behalf Of Alex Bowden
Sent: Monday, 15 June 2015 7:46 PM
To: General Discussion of SQLite Database
Subject: Re: [sqlite] Mozilla wiki 'avoid SQLite'

Oh dear.  So you think that a high level language is one that does things by 
calling a lower level language?  Stop embarrassing yourself.

A high level language is one where the language designers are free to use 
whatever structural concepts best fit the problems that the language is 
designed to address,  whereas a low level language is one where the language 
designers are restricted to using structural concepts that map directly onto an 
assumed hardware model.

The assumption that a low level language compiles to assembler is nonsense.  I 
don?t remember any of them doing this before C, and even later,  many compilers 
still compile directly to machine code.

Assuming that higher level languages compile to lower level languages is also 
nonsense.  And even for ones that do, and a classic example of a language 
designed to do this would be Ratfor, then provided that the lower level 
language is compiling to machine code, then the only thing that is being slowed 
is the build process.  Not runtime execution.   

Now 20 years ago, folk like you, but better informed, would have argued that 
well written lower level language code was more efficient than higher level 
language code.  And sometimes they would have been correct.  But note the 
qualification of well written.  And even then, this was debatable.  If a 
language provides efficient higher level data structures, or fine grain 
synchronisation of multiple threads,  then the user is more likely to use them 
than if they have to create them themselves for each platform.

However today, it is rarely true.

Good modern optimisers can achieve efficiency that few, if any, low level 
language programmers will ever achieve.

And the thing is, that those compilers can do far broader optimisation of 
higher level languages that don?t expose features like the ability to write to 
a random address.  The optimisation potential of C, beyond very local 
optimisation, is minimal.

I?ve been running the same little benchmark across every hardware and language 
platform that I?ve used, for over 30 years.  

And I confess, I was very surprised when Java passed C in about 2005.  And yes, 
that was Java compiled to byte codes with runtime JIT compilation of the byte 
codes to machine code.  But it was faster.

The trend hasn?t reversed.



> On 14 Jun 2015, at 23:42, Scott Doctor <scott at scottdoctor.com> wrote:
> 
> On 6/14/2015 3:00 PM, Simon Slavin wrote:
>> The result is that that higher level the language you write in, the better.
> 
> I disagree. The use of languages higher than C result in slow bloated code. A 
> language that calls a language that calls a language. Simple programs become 
> multi-megabyte resource hogs. I agree that C compilers are able to optimize 
> assembler code to a level that hand-coded assembler probably could not 
> achieve. The problem is that higher level languages are not compiling to 
> assembler, but compiling to the language below it.
> 
> ------------
> Scott Doctor
> scott at scottdoctor.com
> ------------------
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> sqlite-users mailing list
> sqlite-users at mailinglists.sqlite.org
> http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users

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