undefined | Better HN

0 pointsorangetuba4y ago0 comments

I have looked at some benchmarks, and in nearly every benchmark I can find, Go takes 2-4 times as long as C to perform the majority of tasks (except when it is much, much slower).

I believe the original Minecraft is written in Java(?), but it's not really competitive with something like Unreal Engine.

Out of curiosity, which databases are written in GCed environments?

0 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

duped4y ago· 1 in thread

C is significantly slower at concurrency when implemented naively. It's as fast as languages like Go when implemented using the same techniques, which is not obvious and trivial to use like in a higher level GC'd language. GC actually helps out a ton there, for example look at the complexity of async/await in Rust which requires the notion of pinning.

Unreal packs its own garbage collection. This is a pattern you see quite often, GC is discarded because it's slow/the specific implementations don't fit the task, so an alternative GC is written to be used in a lower level language that doesn't require it natively. Contrast to Unity which uses C#. As for Minecraft, like I said originally you don't want to look at just GC for performance problems - that's a naive understanding of why languages perform poorly. Java is actually extremely fast and used in environments with tighter constraints than a game like MC.

https://github.com/gostor/awesome-go-storage#database

https://java-source.net/open-source/database-engines

Not a database but honorable mention, LMAX disrupter: https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/

orangetubaOP4y ago

"C is slower at concurrency when implemented naively"

That's a bit like saying that a Formula 1 car is slower than a Toyota Yaris when operated by a poor driver? What are you implying here?

So you're saying that with languages without GC, you can tailor your own GC that is a good fit to the problem you're trying to solve? Or that when the problem you are trying to solve is a good fit for the GC in your language of choice, you get good performance with less effort?

That's a huge list of databases that I've never heard of. In a sample of the categories, I looked for the most performant one, such as "NoSQL" where the one that comes out as best on benchmarks was Mongo DB which is written in C++. Why are all the number on spots on benchmarks written in C or C++ when the potential of GC languages is higher? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse