

Bram Cohen: Comments on Go - jeff18
http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/71760.html

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jacquesm
On topic: I find it funny that someone of Bram Cohens' standing would miss the
point of fast compilation.

If you're working in plenty of other languages compile time does not go up
linear with code size, but much faster.

When you start out it zips right along, but as soon as you cross that 10,000
line mark the first bits of irritation set it in, and not much later than that
you can go and get a cup of coffee and drink it while your code rebuilds. For
really large projects an hour isn't much at all!

Fast compile time = I won't lose my train of thought while waiting for the
compiler to finish. It's a 'tool' thing, and I think that such details make
for much better tools.

~~~
klipt
"Go's speed of compilation is very nice, although I'm afraid I view that not
so much as a strength of Go but as an awfulness of C++."

I think his point is that Go isn't special in this regard since many languages
already compile much faster than C++. For example, Delphi/Free Pascal.

~~~
barrkel
Indeed. Rob Pike makes a point of the 120kloc RTL compiling in 8 seconds in
his presentation video, but the Delphi RTL on my machine right here compiles
in about 11 seconds, and it has over 417kloc - and much (~ 2 to 3 seconds) of
that time is in linking together a runtime package, for folks who want a
dynamically linked RTL, rather than statically linked.

~~~
uriel
Is that compiling after the equivalent of 'make clean'?

~~~
barrkel
Doesn't really make any difference. Cleaning the RTL takes about 170ms - it's
just deleting some files. Build is driven by msbuild, so there is some .NET
startup cost in there too.

EDIT: Oh, you mean is it an incremental build? No. It's a full clean build,
and that 11 seconds also includes preprocessing some API header files.

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andrewljohnson
I really wish people wouldn't include the name of the author in the title.

I think this should be banned and cleaned up by the moderators in the same way
using numbers in the titles of submissions is, and the same way that
moderators removed "Ohhhh snapppp" from the Go post about the author of Go!

Invariably, Paul Bucheit, Paul Graham, Bram Cohen, Guido van Rossum, Joel
Spolsky, and other famous hackers get voted to the very top of the list. If
these guys are great writers and great thinkers, then their articles will
speak for themselves, and they usually do (but not always).

For the few people who have never heard of Bram Cohen or Joe Hewitt (currently
1 and 2 on HN), then their names are just noise. For those who have heard of
them, it just biases their judgment in both clicking and voting.

In this case, Bram's blog even carries his name... so why make his name the
first two words in the headline? Do we really need to make to use this kind of
name-dropping to highlight content? That sounds like the opposite of content
democratization to me.

~~~
jeff18
Nice rant, however, I submitted this using the YC bookmarklet. :) No subtle
manipulation of Hacker News intended. Hopefully democracy will still be intact
after this serious infraction.

~~~
andrewljohnson
I didn't mean to impugn your motives... just saying I don't think it's a good
thing to do in general.

Also, I'm not familiar with the bookmarklet. Does that auto-generate the
titles or something?

~~~
vorador
No, you can edit the title of the submission like for a regular submission.

