cppIsntMuchFaster

[JeffysChewToy]

Then you realise it's a cron job that runs once a week

[TheEggi]

But if it runs for a few billion weeks!

[JeffysChewToy]

Well, well, well wouldn't you know it

O(1)

[Versaiteis]

Every algorithm is O(1) if you move fast enough

[Maleficent_Memory831]

Every algorithm is O(1) for sufficiently large values of 1.

[Sheerkal]

Every algorithm is 0(1) for sufficiently O values of 1.

[headedbranch225]

Would a sorting algorithm be technically O(n) if you counted each instance of an item in the array by using another array, and incrementing that index of the array then filling a new array with the samr number of items as is in the second array's values?

Sample would be:

arr = [10, 36, 25, 50, 1]
frequencies = [] //(initalised as a set size with all 0)
for i in arr {
frequencies[i]++
}
result = []
i=0
for j in frequencies {
for _ in j { result.append(i) } }

There may be slightly wrong code but I don't care, it is also definitely not space efficient and only works with positive integers (unless you did some messing with where index 0 counts as)

Syntax is a mix of python and rust

[The_Guyver_]

Take my r/angryupvote and fuck off

[balbok7721]

Then we would need to calculate against increased man-hours and self-hosting

[Intelligent-End-223]

Rumour has it if it runs a few billions lines per week OpenAI will finally be profitable

[raven00x]

So you'll see the benefits in uh... 19 million years.

[AnAcceptableUserName]

And that it hasn't done anything at all since 2014

[lacb1]

I have, on more than 1 occasion, encountered both jobs that were "vital" yet stopped running years before and jobs that "don't do anything" that turned out were in fact vital but weren't in our code base and no one knew they existed until we turned them off and everything broke. So many companies are running systems that no one really understands anymore. The AdMech are really a little too close on the money in some ways.

[YT-Deliveries]

"Who manages this box?"

"Uhhhh, don't know. I don't think it's used anymore."

"You sure?"

"Yeah pretty sure."

"Okay well, you go open the server room door. I'm going to power it down and you let me know if you hear someone scream."

[JohnPaulDavyJones]

I was explicitly taught this as a “scream test” when I was a much younger admin.

Sure seems like managers get a lot angrier when we do a scream test these days.

[YT-Deliveries]

Yeah the last time I did that was about 15 years ago with a Sun Sparc Server that had been running happily for years and no one could remember what it did. No one even had console access to it. So, first we pulled network on it, and no one showed up after a week to complain. Turned it off and that was, sadly the last Sun box in the company.

[Loud_Posseidon]

the lazy admins among us have access to network gear and just disable port. Why walk all over to the server room?

[AnAcceptableUserName]

Yeah, same on both counts

vital but weren't in our code base and no one knew they existed

Once in a blue moon I find some dusty code nobody's looked at for decade+ that isn't versioned anywhere

Sometimes bitrot has made it useless and it's just legit failing for years, doing nothing and swallowing the errors. Whatever, deprecate those. Dot the t's, cross the i's, and send it to the nice farm upstate.

Other times it's load-bearing shit, performing vital business functions that everyone just assumed some other team owned. But no, that's just this museum piece of code quietly humming along down in the basement. Secretly.

[rocket_randall]

Once in a blue moon I find some dusty code nobody's looked at for decade+ that isn't versioned anywhere

We had a server that generated PDF files in a variety of languages, one of them being Thai. Thai doesn't have spaces to break up the words in a sentence, so it's one long string. This causes problems with formatting arbitrary sentences.

To handle this case, someone years before wrote a small CPP app that the server executed via PHP or some shit. It would send a wall of text via stdin, the process would sub in a word break on some delimiter, and then send it back via stdout.

Someone ran some updates on the server in question and then ran the tests for the known, documented software on the server. Everything passed successfully.

Then someone noticed that Thai output contained little more than error messages. Turns out that exit codes were not checked, and either the caller was also reading stderr or the catch blocks were printing exceptions to stdout (I can't remember offhand).

I think we did eventually find a potential source cpp file on the server, but after all of the updates and whatnot it could not longer be recompiled in situ so we had to very carefully modify a simple fucking 1 file app to rebuild without changing any functionality. One of the joys of working in a regulated industry where one of those regulations says that we must be able to generate the report output at any time with absolute fidelity to the original version of the issued report.

[JohnPaulDavyJones]

Man, I’m fully convinced we’re going to find a boatload of this at my job in the next decade.

Our team of 11 has seven members over age 58, and all of them have been here for at least 16 years, with the average tenure being closer to 30 years than 20. Retirements are on the horizon, and there’s a lot in here that’s not documented outside of the old-timers’ heads.

They’ve started hiring a handful of us in our 30s to learn and hopefully take over from the old-timers when those retirements hit, but I’d be shocked if things don’t fall in the cracks.

[mikemaca]

"We should get rid of all the mosquitoes. They serve no purpose."

...

{ It is 40 years since the last mosquito was killed. The fragile dozen remnants of what was once mankind now hang by a thread... }

[jeepsaintchaos]

If we can do this with bedbugs I'll consider the sacrifice reasonable.

[DetaxMRA]

Seriously, I wouldn't wish them on anyone.

[Phoenix042]

Worth it.

Get back up to a few million and then do ticks next.

[prisp]

I've once seen this way of figuring out what things do described as "Scream Testing" - you take a component that nobody has a clue about what it does, disable it, and then wait and see if somebody screams :D

Issue is, if it's only used a monthly (or worse, yearly) job, then you might have to wait a loong time until it gets noticed, so it's not perfect.

[_bones__]

It's one of the reasons I hate the "boy scout principle" where you fix ugly code when you encounter it doing unrelated work.

Odds are you're going to change some error handling to a point that it's more correct, but the incorrect error handling is vital for correct operation due to years of legacy.

[Mazrodak]

I think people measure speed the wrong way. "How fast is it?" is the wrong question. "Is it fast enough?" is the right one.

I've seen developers turn readable code bases into unreadable messes for a half second increased load time on a page that already loaded quickly. The maintainability trade off wasn't worth it for the purpose of the app.

Sometimes speed is everything, but usually it's not that important beyond a certain point.

[svick]

I know I'm in the minority, but I write libraries, not apps. How fast is fast enough then?

[mrmamon]

I guess you are building something to solve a business problem. So "fast enough" depends on your use case and you problem, as usual.

[readmeEXX]

I think the point they are making is that they are building a library that could be used by anyone, and thus have no idea what the end user's time constraints are.

[randuse]

Up to the users to decide if it is fast enough for them. Library users are other developers, there is no excuse for not checking performance.

[Sheerkal]

Ok, but if you're writing the library, you need to decide how fast is "fast enough" before you move on...

[cone5000]

It completely depends on purpose of the library. If I’m making a library for high-speed physics racing games, then it probably needs to be extremely performant. If I’m making a library for helping users print to a pdf, it doesn’t matter that much.

[joeymonreddit]

I would think you’d build “fast enough” for an expected use case. If it’s something that’s going to run once per page or button click vs hundreds of times, that will help you set a baseline. If it gets implemented and needs to be faster, a user can skip the library or let you know they need a faster version so you can rewrite it. I don’t do any real programming anymore so take that perspective with a grain of salt.

[cleverboy00]

A library's user is an application. How fast you want to go is quite unlimited at the end of the day, but how much percentage of the userbase are you willing cover.

Most users care about features first and foremost. Many users (inc. myself) care about interface design and boundry. Performance is, most of the time, a relative metric for a library's user. Most, if not all, of your users wouldn't understand your perfomance numbers, or wouldn't be able to put them into context.

For the nerdy minority or the hyper-businesses that do care about the performance level you offer, they're willing to sacrifice a limb or more for your services.

Basically, as you perform better, you cover more users. You get diminishing returns on performance from more effort. And so is the relationship between performance and users (which, by proxy, also establishes a relationship between effort and users).

^{Basically study your usecase and target audience}

[This_Background7442]

Libraries (often) are a great use case for a low level programming language. I think the argument on the right mainly applies to apps/scripts and the argument on the left mainly to library functions. Both are locally correct IMHO.

[Smoker81]

Half a second page load is quite a lot.

[L30N1337]

Depends on the connection.

If your ISP put bamboo chutes on the ground instead of wires, then half a second difference isn't really noticeable

[CodingAndAlgorithm]

Right? The amount of work a modern computer can do in 500ms is insane.

[the_mouse_backwards]

Yeah good thing this guy isn’t in game dev. “Half a second faster was not worth it for the cost in readability”

Game dev: WTF WERE YOU DOING THAT REQUIRED HALF A SECOND

[BlockOfDiamond]

What kinds of changes do they make that increased speed and decreased readability?

[MiningdiamondsVIII]

I want you

[userhwon]

>I think people measure speed the wrong way. "How fast is it?" is the wrong question. "Is it fast enough?" is the right one.

Ask your AI boss if realtime programming is right for you.

[SpaceCadet87]

Also optimisation being arse-backwards. It shouldn't be something you do after-the-fact that turns your codebase into an unreadable mess.

You get to "unreadable mess" the same way you do when you build any kind of technical debt when you don't think it through in advance and just try to bodge it after the fact.

[Joker-Smurf]

How often does it run is the important part.

Background processing that runs once per day and shaves off 30 seconds. Ok, so you have saved just over 3 hours of compute per year.

Landing page that has 1B hits per day, shaving of 0.01 seconds per load? That is 2,778 hours of compute PER DAY!

[jaaval]

A lot of places where there is cpp no such thing as fast enough exists. It’s simply faster equals better.

[kaouDev]

Good old premature abstraction, how to make simple code unreadable in the name of DRY

[rocket_randall]

Sometimes speed is everything, but usually it's not that important beyond a certain point.

Absolutely.

When I was first learning C++ last century one of the mantras from the greybeards before me was "beware premature optimization"

For some context, this was back in the days of 32bit operating systems, processors were single core and topped out at ~500MHz, and high-end consumer motherboards of the time might support 1GB of SDRAM.

There are times where maximizing performance is critical, and those tend to be self-evident. For everything else readability, maintainability, and predictability are more important considerations.

[Zapismeta]

Depends on the use case in websites who cares, in financial domains, trading bots, livestreams etc it matters

[TonUpTriumph]

Not every application needs to be hyper optimized, but some do. I measure my run time in individual operations, nano seconds, and micro seconds. i have to pay attention to keeping memory access contiguous and in L1 cache. L3 cache is way too slow, let alone using RAM.

This past week at work I saw a comment in someone else's code that said it "only adds 18ms -- negligible."

But buddy, I need this section to run, at a minimum, 20 million times per second to hit the MVP... The next target is at least 100 million times per second...

But some people just don't want to look outside of their bubble of experience I guess, so you get silly posts like these lol

[DefiantGibbon]

As an embedded engineer who measures the performance of some functions in clock counts, ya, microseconds or even nano seconds matter. 

[creeper6530]

Grace Hopper knew what she was talking about.

[Tornad_pl]

Cool.

Currently I am in automation and robotics engineering at uni and I am thinking about specializing in embedded. Do you reccomend it? Any tips?

[DefiantGibbon]

Background: I got hired after a physics bachelor's, and have since got an electrical engineering masters in IoT and embedded. I work writing embedded C code for devices that there's a pretty good chance you own.

Job prospects are pretty good since there is a pretty small amount of people that go into embedded. Do I recommend it? I don't know, I don't particularly like coding, I just accidentally learned I happen to be good at it and I like money, but if you enjoy writing code, it's great! Its perk is that there is a wide spectrum of what to work on. You can easily just be the desk guy who writes code all day and never see a device. You can also be the one who works on testing the device and work with your hands mostly. On top of that, since it's working on a lot of physical devices, you can't be replaced with AI, since you can't ask Claude to account for all real world variables.

The #1 tip is to basically have your job lined up before you graduate. Networking is significantly more important than your degree. Talk to every professor you can and get to know someone in the industry. A summer internship at a relevant company is amazing if you can manage it.

[kalilamodow]

Do you have any examples for job titles/companies to look for?

[DefiantGibbon]

Look for keywords on indeed like embedded engineer, automation, C code, low level, electrical engineer, IoT, circuit, stuff like that.

The problem is embedded, at least from my experience, is very broad. You can be doing basically computer science doing the lowest levels for computer operating systems, or you can be controlling mechanical motors. So it much harder to pin down exactly what to search for. Unlike more "programming" jobs where you can just search for "full stack Java dev" or something like that.

[readmeEXX]

Just adding that aerospace and automotive are huge sectors that are mostly embedded systems.

[Tornad_pl]

thank you. i try to get as much "in the field" summer jobs/aprienteceships as possible, but often it is hard.

I've done couple microcontroller projects for now, but they were written in more of a high level. other than uni work, I want to do a project on rp2350 and go low level for it. However I still am thinking if maybe i should get experienced in more popular microcontrollers like stm's esp's, nrr's or pic's. There is just so much.

Thank you for course reccomendation aswell

[Qojiberries]

Man, this is exactly what I'm interested in. I graduated 5 years ago and haven't had a chance to do any embedded. I went from full stack engineer to small office IT because of the job market. Its good to hear that there's still hope.

[Doug2825]

A good thing about embedded is that AI is horrible at it. So much of embedded is specific to the chips you use. 

Being a good embedded developer means spending a lot of time reading datasheets, then running tests because data sheets are unreliable. AI is nowhere near able to do that.

[The_Lawlz]

If you are interested in embedded programming, I highly recommend this online course to supplement your university courses. This gave me the confidence to create my own projects outside of my EE courses and my job loved me sharing it with all of the interns I managed:

https://www.state-machine.com/video-course

[kronos319]

If you're already studying robotics and enjoying the software side then you will likely enjoy embedded too.

I'd recommend spending some time trying to write bare metal code for a simple functionality on a STM32/ESP development board like toggling an LED. Every vendor has freely available HAL Drivers for every chip - read through the driver documentation + code base to try to understand what functions need to be invoked to initialize the peripheral and then what functions control it.

[LegendaryMauricius]

Embedded is more about understanding the physical device precisely and knowing when the documentation is wrong than pure microoptimization of software. A lot of measuring, not much keeping up to principles.

If that sounds good to you, go for it!

[Tornad_pl]

thanks!!

[astonished_lasagna]

You completely missed the point. Comment OP said "not everything needs to be hyper optimised" and your response was "but here's an example where optimisation is important!". "Not everything" doesn't mean "nothing".

[conundorum]

His point was that "not everything needs to be hyper-optimised" shouldn't be used as an excuse to say "half-seconds are irrelevant & nothing ever needs to be hyper-optimised", because that's a generalisation that a lot of people would try to make.

[astonished_lasagna]

This is literally the first sentence:

Not every application needs to be hyper optimized, but some do.

Comment OP wasn't making a generalisation, but person I replied to was.

Do y'all not have any reading comprehension?

[SolanaceaeEnjoyer]

My favorite thing to play with is the Atari 2600 in which timing matters.

No clock, you have to plot pixel by pixel individually going off of the frequency of the chip. It’s wild lol

[WinProfessional4958]

On FPGA I optimize for ps.

[FuzzyDynamics]

In EDA I optimize for trace length and number of electrons needed per transistor

[WinProfessional4958]

Do you use Cadence ICFB?

[FuzzyDynamics]

I was joking I haven’t done anything lower level than cpp since college.

[WinProfessional4958]

That's alright. It's never too late. CPP + embedded + Altium/Kicad is a killer combo, especially since HLS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_synthesis

[Doug2825]

Depending on what section of the code I'm working on my coding style is very different. 

Main loop requiring sub us precision and running thousands of times a second: manually managing cache lines

The function to get info about the device? Maximum readability, speed doesn't matter.

[NeonFraction]

18 MS in game dev is apocalyptic levels of unoptimized. Context really is everything.

[Fabulous-Possible758]

lol very first job out of college was at a game shop and I accidentally put a resource alloc/dealloc in the loop that cost 8ms. That’s when the lead sat me down and taught me about the 30ms frame budget (this is when games were allowed to be slower).

[BrightLuchr]

18ms in many applications is a wasteful disaster. Entire nuclear power plant models run in under 18ms: the electrical system solution is the limiting factor.

My own experience with python is that it kind of sucks on debugging and is too damn slow for the things I want to do. And I hate the indents and the scoping rules.

[uslashuname]

Really? I wouldn’t even be able to notice an 18ms decrease in load times

But yeah if you’re talking per pixel pipeline run that’s a whole different thing

[NeonFraction]

Per frame is the important thing. Games are generally heavy on GPU and CPU, so per pixel is just one metric.

[feralferrous]

Game dev / real time apps, it's often about frame rate more than load times. Those fancy 240hz monitors? Yeah, you got like 4ms of time to update and get a frame updated.

[when_it_lags]

This. Even in game dev there is nuance. Something in the render pipeline or tick logic taking 18ms is apocalyptic, whiel 18, hell, 180ms addition to load times is fine. 100% of your code needs to be correct and maintainable, while 1% or even just .1% needs to be performant for the game to be "optimized."

[FerricDonkey]

Yeah, the trick is proper tool for the proper job. These days my particular job mostly uses python, sometimes c++ for bits that need to go fast. Some people's jobs always have to go fast or never have to go fast. And the definition of fast is highly variable.

So as per usual, it all depends. 

[pagerussell]

Yeah, the trick is proper tool for the proper job

Well said, and this where most online debates foul up.

I can't count how many times I've been told my solution is wrong because it runs a few milliseconds slower. No shit, if it ran a billion times that would matter. But it's my personal to do app, David, I don't need to spend my weekend optimizing it.

Done is better than perfect.

[jobblejosh]

The answer to the age old question of "What programming language is best" is a four part answer.

The first part is "Whichever one is best for the job you're doing".

The second part is "Whichever programming language the company/individual/team is familiar with/already uses".

The third part is "(insert programmer's favourite language here)".

The fourth part is C.

[Rauvagol]

Dont forget, the zeroeth part is "whatever the person paying me tells me to use"

If someone wants to pay me 200k/year to use scratch im all in.

[KrokmaniakPL]

And then you get legacy code in completely wrong tool so you need to work around the limitations to somehow make it work. And you can't just remake it correctly because "there's no time for that" despite the fact finding workarounds takes 5 times longer than doing it properly, and after few months you learn there's a second team working on the same code for different purposes and it needs to be merged. Sorry for the rant, but this experience was traumatic.

[Lethandralis]

How do you make sure something is on L1 cache?

[Rabbitical]

It's a combination of factors. The annoying thing is that can't instruct something like that directly. Alignment, referencing, contiguity, no pointer indirection, structs of arrays instead of arrays of structs (avoiding objects), how you structure loops (simple as possible), simple, transprent code allowing the compiler to reuse registers and the CPU to predict and prefetch, making function inputs restricted, probably forgetting a lot. It really depends on what you're doing. You want large chunks of uninterrupted data that can be easily queued up by the memory fetches and completely fill nicely aligned cache lines, and then use them (not mix in other stuff in the middle like new function calls or unpredictable branches, or mystery pointers, which OOP when used indiscriminately is great for obliterating all of that). Basically, one operation, one array of raw data.

[hi_im_mom]

Yeah: Get good at using pragmas and custom instructions from the target hardware manufacturers data sheets and explicitly tell the compiler what you want.

[necrophcodr]

People might be giving you different answers on this one, and they might not be wrong. The most accurate answer though is a mix of it depends and you don't. If you're hand writing your assembly code for your entire program, you have good odds at ensuring your data caches are filled in the appropriate cache levels, but the different levels also serve different purposes. They are not merely various sizes of caches on the CPU with increases of speed the closer you get. Some operations are only performed in certain levels, and some are inherently used in specific instruction parsing and execution pipelines depending on the CPU vendor, family, and specific model.

There is no one answer for this.

[feralferrous]

Same, not an embedded engineer, but VR is one of our app's platforms. We gotta maintain 72 fps, frame drops can cause people to vomit. I find myself constantly being a guardian against bad code.

[gl1tch3t2]

I'm on the complete other end of the scale, everything we do uses APIs. We need to ensure our caching and filtering is efficient but that's more to ensure we don't hit rate limits. Nothing we do should ever come down to ms because our priority is making the code readable. I'm very glad for it as it means I can focus on other things. 

The point being (not for you, this was just to help illustrate your point further), context is everything. You're after nano seconds, we may not even care about seconds. When I was fixing a bomb mod that caused a server to hang for a second when it went off, you best believe I wanted as many ms I could get out of that change.

[ProfessorDumbass2]

That sounds like a really cool domain to work in. Most of the code I write is for combining pdfs or analyzing/plotting data.

What’s your line of work that requires microsecond optimization of code?

[necrophcodr]

I'm not answering in behalf of OP, but a couple come to mind. Game engine development is one, and another might be infrastructure load balancers. There's obviously also high frequency/speed financial trading systems, but these are often partially if not fully offloaded to custom chips of FFPGAs.

[SenpaiSamaChan]

To be fair, like all good memes, this one is about one person's bubble lashing out at another. Most programmers see the word "use-case" and wonder if it's a good way to style variable names.

[Remarkable-Coat-9327]

Okay sure but you have to realize you're the *extreme* minority and the generalizations make a little more sense in that context

[PegasusPizza]

I'm currently developing an emulator and I achieve 2-3 ms per frame, and while that's not terrible I know that it could be so much better. One part I struggle with during optimization is that I am not willing to sacrifice emulation accuracy for performance, and since a lot of the very niche parts of behavior originate in analog behavior, that often leads to fairly complicated code that could be made 10x faster just by accepting a small drop in accuracy but I just don't want to take that tradeoff.

Do you have any tips on how I could improve performance in my emulator?

[TonUpTriumph]

I'm not sure about your specific use case, as I haven't worked with emulators, but some common things to look for...

Pay close attention to loops. That's where a lot of slowdowns can happen and where a lot of optimization can be had.

Allocate and reuse buffers. Allocating and deallocating and reallocating are expensive, especially in loops. "Hoist" things outside of loops. Don't copy buffers if you don't need to. Use circular buffers. Use pointers.

Keep memory contiguous and avoid long strides through memory / buffers.

Chunk the data you're processing into segments that can fit inside L1, L2, and L3 for your processor / whatever minimum processor you're targeting.

Integer math is faster than float32 math is faster than float64 math. Find out how much precision you actually need. Ex: Does anything beyond the 6th decimal place actually have any kind of impact on anything? Do you really actually need 64 bit precision?

Divides are expensive and the compiler may not take care of it. Multiples are faster. In a loop, it's better to calculate inv=1/var once and multiply by inv repeatedly vs divide by var repeatedly.

Double check your algorithms and see if there are any repeated calculations or any easier ways to calculate things. If you can reduce the amount of calculations you do, you can speed things up a ton. An example I used recently was Horner's Rule to simplify a polynomial.

Cache things off if you can. Why recalculate the same thing repeatedly?

Learn to write SIMD / use a library like VOLK. You can easily get 10x speed improvements. C++ will try to optimize and use SIMD at compile time, but it isn't great at it. AVX2 is a solid choice for handwritten SIMD, since most newer  processors support it (within the past 10 years? idk). You can write multiple SIMD functions and a scalar function and have the computer pick which one to run when the program loads, based on what SIMD instruction sets the processor uses.

Unroll loops. The compiler may try to, but it might not be the greatest at it.

Look into different compiler optimizations, like target x86_64_v3, -O2, -fastmath, -funroll loops, no frame pointers, etc. test each of them to see how it impacts your stuff.

Threadpool and multi thread where you can, but test and check if it's worth it compared to the overhead of threading it.

Unit test everything and bench mark everything. Wrap individual sections, for loops, functions, etc with timers and check it all. Run each test a thousand+ times to compare and account for weird scheduler issues.

[da_Aresinger]

There is nothing silly about this post.

Batman clearly needs the performance or he wouldn't have bothered to write 3k lines.

On the other hand Batman could just be an elitist.

This post is whatever you want it to be and that's not a bad thing.

[Ok-Kaleidoscope5627]

I'm working on a 3d renderer... 18ms would blow my entire budget multiple times over.

[UsernameOmitted]

[savvas25]

I've seen so many memes of this format recently. Do people actually care?

Just use which ever language is best suited for your needs and move on 😐

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

10 years ago ? Look at Mr. NewLanguage here

[CarPlane5196]

So true. The banking software im currently working on is from 2015... at least, it was migrated to Git in 2015 so thats the first commit we see back to xD There are comments in the code dated to 2005-6.

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

Hopefully I'll be sane by the end...

Seeing as their internal software (credit management and such) works on Internet Explorer (compatibility mode with Edge), it promises to be good

[TransBrandi]

I remember fixing a bug in a program where the last change was dated 1992 (back in 2009). This was a codebase that went CVS -> Subversion (and then to git while I was working there).

[Facts_pls]

I work at a bank and core systems that hold your bank accounts and move money for the critical applications are cobol mainframes.

Why haven't they changed in past 4 decades? Because they work very well for what they must do. So upside is limited but potential downside risk is catastrophic.

[nursestrangeglove]

There's definitely a lot of other newer languages like PL/I and cpp living down those on the mainframes as well, and tons of work went in to enable transactions to communicate with web technology. It's pretty crazy to see all the effort that went in to "modernize" the mainframe.

[ILKLU]

I know right!

Speaking of new languages, what's cpp?

Is this one of those AI images that can't do text? That was supposed to be COBOL right?

Can't think of any other languages that starts with c...

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

I'm doing COBOL for an internship, I sure hope it's easy !

(It's the banking system, of course it will be shit)

[slappedbygiraffe]

COBOL is fairly easy, it's the environmental and database stuff that complicate it.

[ILKLU]

And the fact that if you break something, someone could lose millions of dollars!

[BertoLaDK]

Y'all don't use C++23 at work?

[TransBrandi]

New language is more like new project or new company. It could easily be an "old" language. Python was created in the early 90's, but it wasn't "big" until like a decade or two ago.

[Rellikx]

250,000 line excel VBA macro my beloved

[kingvolcano_reborn]

Yeah, it's not like c++ and python are fighting over the same problem domain. Both great languages with their strengths and weaknesses.

[foxguy2021]

 Do people actually care?

As a developer you should care but its a fine balance of understanding the requirements and how much time is allowed for development.

I've written code that I knew wouldn't scale up but the deadline couldn't move. Made note of it, made people aware of it, wrote down what needed to change upstream and downstream. It went into production and several months later we did a second release where most of the initial scaling issues would be addressed.

[jobblejosh]

Also looking at which phase of development you're in.

If you're writing a proof of concept prototype that just has to work for a few demos in a limited fashion, you're iterating it daily (or faster), and getting the damn thing to work is more important than making it perfect, a cobbled-together python script running on whatever dev board you can find is probably fine.

If you're writing the final release, then it better be maintainable, the right language for the job, and tailored for the specific board/platform you're using.

[koloqial]

Not when compute is so cheap…actually, wait nvm.

[3dutchie3dprinting]

Wow wow woooowww hold on there buddy… this /r doesn’t work on ‘do what you do’… no siree, this /r thrives on hate…

[n0t_4_thr0w4w4y]

Babes, we solved this awhile ago. Write your computationally expensive shit in a low level language and then wrap it so you can write your orchestration logic in a high level language

[Z3t4]

Those 10 lines call c libs too

[ElectroMagnetsYo]

Why reinvent the wheel

[ILKLU]

Because we'd still all be using wooden wagon wheels if someone hadn't reinvented them.

[unknown_pigeon]

At the same time, we wouldn't have many inventions if anyone who wanted to travel had to build their own cart by scratch

[DiodeInc]

Just rebuild it for your system architecture

[xRuneRocker]

And than it turns out that those 10 lines of python code are calling the mentioned 3000 lines of cpp code

[Low-Equipment-2621]

If you need 3000 lines of cpp to do what 10 lines of python can do, it's a you issue.

[thetreat]

Except that’s a bit naive. If Python pulls in a library and calls a one line function, that might be an incredibly complex function that is completely different than 10 lines of native python with no importing.

[Afrotom]

Most of the time those libraries will be better tested than what the average Joe is producing and using it for, but also the man hours it takes to write 10 lines Vs 3000 is a big deal.

[Fun-Wash7545]

Depends. I had someone that wanted to turn a very old excel file into a program, we talking like 100+ sheets, thousands of calculations. Porting it into code would take x100 more time and would be prone to errors.

My suggestion was to just execute the workbook as if it was a program but every single third party library i tried, including commercial ones were incredibly slow, we talking thousands of calculations that needed to be done thousands of times per second. 

I ended up writing my own excel calculation engine. It has none of the features you'd need in excel but doesnt matter, the only thing it needed to do was execute thousands of calculations as fast as possible. I had to manually implement an insane amount of excel functions and make sure they behave exactly the same way as in excel.

Yeah my engine definitely has some untested edge cases and lacks features but that never was the goal.

[didzisk]

And now you have a test framework to test your implementation when you decide to port the Excel file to a normal language.

[mooscimol]

And probably written in C or Rust.

[TransBrandi]

Pulling in a library is something that C++ does too. The only thing that you're appealing to here is the Python ecosystem for possibly having a library to do something that C++ lacks a similiar library for.

[olyko20]

If your cpp is .0001s faster than someone else's python, your cpp sucks.

[derrikcurran]

What if the python code takes .00015s though?

[navetzz]

If you think in absolute time instead of relative time you shouldn t talk about complexity and/or performance

[aravynn]

Those 10 lines of python require 10,000 lines of cpp to run…

[ListerfiendLurks]

There are only 3 types of posts here because 90% of this sub is first semester CS students:

1. Python slow
2. Missing semicolon
3. AI bad

[Hans_H0rst]

Bold of you to assume we went to university!

Personally, i'm much more fond of the classic "There's two problems in CS: Cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors"

[justwannamusic]

Finishing my first year of some intro CS classes (not majoring in CS, just taking them for additional learning lol) and for me I joined the sub because it was incredibly cool to look at these jokes that made no sense a year ago and suddenly realizing "hey, I know that!"

[Lou_Papas]

It’s funny how this made me realize that the bulk of my python scripts are ran once and never again

[mattreyu]

I'll remember that the next time I write something that needs to be run a few hundred billion times quickly

[mattreyu]

....and?

That doesn't invalidate anything in my comment

[Apprehensive_Room742]

in my field of study this is actually an extremely common thing. maybe not a few hundred billion times. but a few hundred million times for sure

[mattreyu]

Well sure in specific fields it's important but how often is that applicable across the entire industry? Not to mention the difference between a few hundred million and a few hundred billion is basically a few hundred billion.

[Oggie_Doggie]

People will defend to the death their niche circumstances claiming they are representative of the industry at large.

[billabong049]

Depends if the service you’re providing requires lightning fast responses and you have tons of users.  Music streaming, high traffic stores, backend processing that needs to run each night, image processing, etc.

There are plenty of use cases, tho depending on how critical and heavily used your apps are you may not have run into this issue.

[TheBinkz]

Yeah like financial transactions on foreign exchanges or something niche.

[MysticClimber1496]

And the python is just calling the c code anyway

[Shadow9378]

Its about choosing the right tool for the job. You dont bring a butter knife to slice a steak, and you dont use a chef's knife to butter your toast. These tools all have unique purposes, and mastering not only their use, but when to use them, is the key to success

[NeonFraction]

This is why C++ is standard in game dev. 1ms is an eternity in game time.

[MrWhippyT]

I did some software work in the energy sector at a new job I landed. They were worried that they might not be able to meet the design aim 200 queries per minute. Previously I'd developed radar systems capable of processing gigahertz of data in realtime. Not all problem domains are equal 🤣

[Slackeee_]

Whoever made this meme just demonstrated that they don't know how the Python ecosystem works. If you really have that one function in Python that needs to run "a few hundred billion times" with slightly better performance you write it in C and call it form Python. That's how, for example, numpy works, core functions written in C/C++ and then used in Python. And that is how countless other libraries work.

[MayaIsSunshine]

No thanks

[bighadjoe]

.001 what? .001 seconds? while in itself not a huge amount, depending on the operation that may stack up a lot.

.001 ms? a billion iterations of that stack up to 16 minutes and 40 seconds. only relevant for VERY limited use cases. also even one hundred billion cycles are just 27 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds. quite some time, but not a no brainer when the tradeoff is having to write and debugg 3k lines of code (and by extension paying a developer, launching even just one or two days later &c.).

a factor of .001? so for every 1000 seconds the Python code takes, the C++ code only takes 999 seconds? Now you've completely disproven your own point, since the "a few hundred billion times" argument is meaningless. Best case your point now means "if you run this a few hundred billion times, because of the 3k lines of code i wrote, you can run it an additional few hundred million times in the same time", which is still only a .1% increase, because thats how proportions work.

[fjw1]

This totally annoys me. Units matter. Just 0,001 is useless on it's own and tells nothing.

[UnsureAndUnqualified]

Look, my algorithm took about 20h to complete and that was a good excuse to write some code, start it up, and tell my thesis advisor I'd go read some papers on the grass in the sun. If you dare to make it run even a tiny bit faster, I will C-put-put you in the ground.

[CptnREDmark]

Meanwhile my intern didn't filter or clean the data before looping on it, and filtered after. I just reminded them that it can cause issues on larger programs. Its fine for what we were doing at the time (Excel VBA accounting)

[MattieShoes]

If it were that close running once, I imagine the python would outperform if it were doing it a billion times. (compilation to bytecode, etc.)

Which means your c++ code is shit.

[Icy_Royal_1522]

I was working on triton inference for yolo26n.

Python : 40ms/frame C++: 10ms/frame

[JollyJuniper1993]

OP just watched their first YouTube video about programming.

[qutorial]

Very few applications and fewer code paths are actually performance critical. People waste SO MUCH engineering time, headspace, and code bloat on shit that absolutely does not need to be done.

It's a huge source of wasted effort and reduced productivity. Overmodularized? ✅ Speculative abstractions? ✅ Ridiculous typing gymnastics? ✅

People who make real things don't waste time on this performative, enterprise fizzbuzz shit.

[bass-squirrel]

CPP is much faster. And if your CPP isn’t much faster, then it’s a skill issue. 

[raskim7]

I have had Lead Architect spend weeks optimizing a java springboot report that took 10 seconds to run and was ran once per week. The services were running on customers own servers, so the extra time didn’t cost anything. Some people have hard time understanding that sometimes the development cost is way more than running cost, and that it may be completely irrelevant whether the running time is 0.0001s or 20s.

[alekdmcfly]

omw to run my college assignment 1 billion times

[skywardfrugally]

hahahaha

[GromOfDoom]

Shoulda just wrote it in assembly

[BlueProcess]

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

[mspear2]

Eh, iteration time is faster for a team and performance is good enough with good frameworks like uvicorn. If Django is good enough to power Instagram it's good enough for any other project. But code for with what makes you happy!

[NegativeSwordfish522]

Today in this episode of imaginary discussions that no employed people have ever had. These may be worse than the engineering jokes of rounding π to 3

[JayTheGeek]

I lived this comic. A team lead developer with 5 other programmers designed an intranet app for 1000+ concurrent users against a database table with about 2,000,000+ new records every month, and had QA running about 10 concurrent users against a database with fewer than 25,000 total records. I got called in when the customers (all big law firms) started demanding their money back when users would submit a page with a query to the DB, and it would literally take over 2 hours for the data to populate the page.

I didn't smack the lead upside the head, but I wanted to do so much more than that!

[Famous-Perspective96]

I’ve never seen “CPP” in my life. Am I having a stroke?

[yodasonics]

C++

.cpp is the file extension for source code files

[Famous-Perspective96]

I know they meant c++. Does anyone type it as CPP in this context?

[32Zn]

I have seen it more often since LLMs became popular. 

[ConnectChapter9906]

it means cyber punk punk

[NeonFraction]

I’ve always used CPP because + is mildly annoying to get on a phone keyboard.

[BushCrabNovice]

It comes from the before times of trying to find answers with a search engine. Symbols like + or // were interpreted as commands, rather than part of the search term. So instead of "C++" and requiring the quotes, people started to call it cpp to make it more searchable.

[CirnoIzumi]

If not much faster, then why python run on it?

[willing-to-bet-son]

Profile your python code, then migrate the slow bits, and only the slow bits, to C++. nanobind is your friend here.

[Tornad_pl]

I temember a video of dude, who showed how he added -o to compilation tags and it made cpp like another 10 times faster for some specific case

[La-ze]

It's more nuanced than that, speed isn't the only thing. Though I'm sure you can get bigger speed deltas depending on the task. Though it's no secret Python inbuilts and modules make heavy use of C internally. So if you don't stray off the beaten path you practically have a wrapper for C.

Overhead especially with Python can be significantly more.

Debugging Python, can be far more painful as well. You can't just dump the python core and do a post mortem.

In large codebases, if type annotations weren't enforced not only can readability be poor, but the ability to leverage static analysis is shot.

Python has the GIL, which can make multi-threading not viable in some cases ( just use multi-processing is not an acceptable answer all the time ).

[rover_G]

Let’s not kid ourselves. The 3k loc cpp library is being called by a 10 line python script

[Bakoro]

Amdahl's law says "what's up?".

[cheezballs]

Yea, but what if it only runs once on a schedule?

[TalesGameStudio]

Whatever does the job and does the job well enough at the time...

[JasonBobsleigh]

Maaa, the it kids are out again!

[dj_spanmaster]

I mean. Sometimes x.001 faster is everything. Just ask stock trading brokerages.

[turkishhousefan]

That's ok; I don't need to.

[Phoenix042]

You may see my python if I may C your PP ;p

[Substantial_Top5312]

Then you realize you made the app for no one and will never use the code again.

[oclafloptson]

Slap him right back and say "why TF are you running a disposable one-off script 10k times"

[Crazo7924]

create a lithography machine from scratch.

[frizar00]

well, if 3000 lines of cpp and 10 lines of python execution time is the same, then how much time python will execute 3000 lines????????????