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Why (most) High Level Languages are Slow // A Random Walk Through Geek-Space

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In the last month or two I’ve had basically the same conversation half a dozen times, both online and in real life, so I figured I’d just write up a blog post that I can refer to in the future. The reason most high level languages are slow is usually because of two reasons: But really, both of these boil down to a single reason: the language heavily encourages too many allocations. First, I’ll just state up front that for all of this I’m talking mostly about client-side applications. If you’re spending 99.9% of your time waiting on the network then it probably doesn’t matter how slow your language is – optimizing network is your main concern. I’m talking about applications where local execution speed is important. I’m going to pick on C# as the specific example here for two reasons: the first is that it’s the high level language I use most often these days, and because if I used Java I’d get a bunch of C# fans telling me how it has value types and therefore doesn’t have these issues (t

Why (most) High Level Languages are Slow // A Random Walk Through Geek-Space A Random Walk Through Geek-Space Brain dumps and other ramblings from Sebastian Sylvan Contents Why (most) High Level Languages are Slow 13 / Apr 2015 programming languages software engineering In the last month or two I've had basically the same conversation half a dozen times, both online and in real life, so I figured I'd just write up a blog post that I can refer to in the future. The reason most high level languages are slow is usually because of two reasons: They don't play well with the cache. They have to do e

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