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0 pointsburntsushi5y ago0 comments

This is a bad take. ripgrep, to my knowledge, cannot be written in a higher level language without becoming a lot slower.[1] And yet, if I removed its use of parallelism by default, there will be a significantly degraded user experience by virtue of it being a lot slower.

This isn't an "obsession." It's engineering.

[1] - I make this claim loosely. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence and all that. But if I saw ripgrep implemented in, say, Python and it matched speed in the majority of cases, I would learn something.

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pjmlp5y ago

Python isn't really something I would even think as possible example, Common Lisp, D, Nim, Swift, most likely.

burntsushiOP5y ago

So? I said, "higher level language." I didn't say, "Python specifically."

I would guess D could do it.

I don't know enough about Nim or Swift.

I would learn something if Common Lisp did it. I'd also learn something if Haskell or Go did it.

cb3215y ago

I am not trying to contradict anyone here, but any language mature enough to have an impl/way to not have arbitrary performance ceilings needs access to inline assembly/SIMD. Cython/Nim/SBCL can all do that..probably Haskell..Not so sure about Go or Swift. Anyway, many languages can respond well to optimization effort. I doubt anyone disagrees.

At the point of realizing the above no ceiling bit, the argument devolves to more one about (fairly subjective) high/low levelness of the code itself/the effort applied to optimizing, not about the language the code is written in. So, it's not very informative and tends to go nowhere (EDIT: especially when the focus is on a single, highly optimized tool like `rg` as opposed to "broad demographic traits" of pools of developers, and "levelness" is often somewhat subjective, too).

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eru5y ago

I suspect Don Stewart might be able to do it in Haskell.

That's basically by knowing enough about GHC to carefully trigger all the relevant optimizations.

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cb3215y ago

Cython with all the appropriate cdef type declarations can match C and so might also do it. Not sure Cython exactly counts as "Python"..it's more a superset/dialect { and I also doubt such a port would hold many lessons for @burntsushi, but it bore noting. }

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