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From: James Kuyper <jameskuyper@alumni.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Baby X is bor nagain
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2024 03:26:45 -0400
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On 6/17/24 03:30, Kaz Kylheku wrote:
> On 2024-06-17, James Kuyper <jameskuyper@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:
>> The problem is that Bart's compiler is VERY unusual. It's customized for
>> his use, and he has lots of quirks in the way he thinks compilers should
>> work, which are very different from those of most other programmers. In
>> particular, compilation speed is very important to him, while execution
>> speed is almost completely unimportant, which is pretty much the
>> opposite of the way most programmers prioritize those things.
>
> Most programmers use Javascript and Python, which follow Bart's
> priorities. Fast, invisible compilation to some kind of byte code (plus
> possibly later JIT), slow execution time.

Perhaps I should have said "most C programmers"; C tends to attract
those who have a need for fast execution time.
Most of my own programming experience has been with programs that worked
on data coming down to Earth from NASA satellites. My programs read one
or more input files, process them, and write one or more output files,
with no human interaction of any kind. Those programs each ran in batch
processing mode thousand of times a day, and the load they placed on the
processors was a significant cost factor - the slower they operated, the
more processors we had to maintain in order to get the output data
coming out as fast as the input data was coming in. Even though they
performed complex scientific calculations on the data, they were
primarily I/O bound, so our top priority was to design them to minimize
the amount of I/O that needed to be done.
I fully understand that this experience gives me a biased view of
programming - but so does everyone else's experience. I am in no danger
of believing that all programs are batch processing, and you should not
imagine that all programs are interactive. Some of the biggest, most
power computers in the world process weather forecasting data 24/7, and
many of those programs operate in a batch mode keeping pace with
real-time data, similar to the way mine operated.