04.03.08
Where are the fast dynamic languages?
- But I also knew, and forgot, Hoare’s dictum that premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
- – Donald Knuth
Something bizarre happened on the Groovy-dev mailing list the other day. Alex Tkachman made what I thought was a simple suggestion: since some rarely used features of the language make it slow, we should have a keyword or annotation which says to the compiler, “Hey there, compiler, I’m not using those features in this code, so please give me the faster code.” I had expected the others to debate the pros and cons of the idea, but instead, they couldn’t quite understand it.
They kept saying you’d need to check that the features weren’t actually used at runtime. I suggested the checks could work like assertions: have them on while testing, but off when performance mattered. But that didn’t seem to sink in. At one point, they even said that turning off these features would “betray” the core values of the language.