It is great that Fil-C exists. This is the sort of technique that is very effective for real programs, but that developers are convinced does not work. Existence proofs cut through long circular arguments.
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Some programs have a ~4x slowdown. That's also not super common, but it happens.
Most programs are somewhere in the middle.
> for the use-cases where C/C++ are still popular
This is a myth. 99% of the C/C++ code you are using right now is not perf sensitive. It's written in C or C++ because:
- That's what it was originally written in and nobody bothered to write a better version in any other language.
- The code depends on a C/C++ library and there doesn't exist a high quality binding for that library in any other language, which forces the dev to write code in C/C++.
- C/C++ provides the best level of abstraction (memory and syscalls) for the use case.
Great examples are things like shells and text editors, where the syscalls you want to use are exposed at the highest level of fidelity in libc and if you wrote your code in any other language you'd be constrained by that language's library's limited (and perpetually outdated) view of those syscalls.
I am curious though. What assumptions do you think I'm making that you think are invalid?
(Browser performance is like megapixels or megahertz … a number that marketing nerds can use to flex, but that is otherwise mostly irrelevant)
When I say 99% of the C code you use, I mean “use” as a human using a computer, not “use” as a dependency in your project. I’m not here to tell you that your C or C++ project should be compiled with Fil-C. I am here to tell you that most of the C/C++ programs you use as an end user could be compiled with Fil-C and you wouldn’t experience an degraded experience if that happened
Since performance is largely correlated to battery life, of course I would notice. An Nx reduction in battery life would certainly be a degraded experience.