undefined | Better HN

0 pointsvkazanov2y ago0 comments

Most reasonable people in the industry understand that Java can be fast, especially in benchmark-oriented code. The problem is that the OOP-first ideology of the language and the coding culture surrounding it is not performance-oriented, especially with modern machines that don't like pointer-chasing.

One not very well known fact is that just-in-time compilers have more optimisation-specific info than pure ahead-of-time compilers, i.e. most used code paths, real types used for polymorphic values, etc. That is, until your AOT compiler uses something like a profile-guided optimisation.

In practice though writing to performance in Java takes a very dedicated effort. Real Java programs are horrible with memory, okay (for an AOT languguage) in long-running compute-intensive tasks, and painfully slow at short-living tasks such as CLI utils.

Almost any real program written in C would run circles around most off-the-shelf Java programs.

Turns out, though, all of that doesn't really matter :-)

0 comments

estebank2y ago

What I noticed is that you have a lot of tools available to tune Java applications, but it was more necessary to rely on them to get to a good spot. In the Rust version, I got a 2x speed improvement by using a rayon thread pool instead of tokio, but the improvements in the Java version were 100x by the end of it.

vkazanovOP2y ago

Java tooling in general is great, that's true.

But nothing beats Vtune for squeezing the lemon of a tight loop of C code beyond any reason :-) Java just doesn't lean itself well to that kind low-level code wrangling. One misstep - and the performance house of cards falls apart.

kaba02y ago

I don’t think there is much point to these discussions without at least fixing some parameters/problem domain across languages. Of course pointer chasing is worse than a well-thought out encoding that fits many objects into a cache-line and is sequentially accessed. The question is — can the problem at hand use such a structure in the first place? Because not every problem can be solved with ECSs and the like - hell, I would even go as far to claim that most programs have a small hot loop, and otherwise spend their time slowly crawling through vast amounts of code and data in a non-orderly fashion. What part is prone to nice, sequential access is traditionally handled by the DB, which does its work very well. For the resulting 10 lines that has to be iterated through, it doesn’t really matter if it’s pointer chasing, especially when it has to wait for IO at every step in a typical server application.

So if we actually compare similar problems at hand, for a certain kind the difference is negligible, and is well offset by safety, productivity, maintainability. Hell, due to having safer primitives, one might be able to take advantage of better parallelism, that easily makes up for the slower single-core performance.

vkazanovOP2y ago

I agree with most things you say. This is why most DBs are written in C relatives or descendants: C++, Rust, or just good old C. And Java dominates in the server-side business logic domain.

But boy it's cumbersome in anything other than those long running jit-friendly server-side processes..!

PS for IO-heavy purposes almost any mem-managed language would do. The real code running there is OS figuring out hardware and physical reality.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

estebank2y ago

vkazanovOP2y ago

Java tooling in general is great, that's true.

kaba02y ago

vkazanovOP2y ago

I agree with most things you say. This is why most DBs are written in C relatives or descendants: C++, Rust, or just good old C. And Java dominates in the server-side business logic domain.

But boy it's cumbersome in anything other than those long running jit-friendly server-side processes..!

PS for IO-heavy purposes almost any mem-managed language would do. The real code running there is OS figuring out hardware and physical reality.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse