

Ask HN: What startups write C heavily? - brewerhimself

Just curious.
======
kator
Large scale environments where real performance matters.

I wrote a system the has to handle 4 Billion transactions a day and a peak of
45,000 per second. And has to respond in 10ms or else the results of the
transaction are discarded.

I wrote it in PHP so it would be easier for my team to maintain but it would
not scale beyond 4,500qps then I re-wrote it in C as an apache module and it
now scales to 25,000qps per server.

Sometimes you just have to write stuff in C. I've been writing in C for 28
years. I write other languages as often as I can but once in a while I have to
go back to C to get something done. Right tool for the right job!

~~~
chc
In fairness, there are probably a lot of languages that could have handled
that load without too much trouble — C, C++, Java, OCaml, Haskell, maybe
Erlang. But C does make high performance fairly easy.

------
damian2000
Startups doing hardware projects which use embedded controllers: I _think_
most 'firmware' as its called is written in C. Also, a bit unrelated but
'Verilog' and 'VHDL' are C-like low level hardware description languages used
especially for prototyping via FPGAs.

~~~
cnvogel
In the embedded world C is the dominating language, for sure, and VHDL or
Verilog are used, not only for prototyping but for regular FPGA code.

But it looks completely different from C:

\---- C example ----

int main(int argc,char __argv){ int i; for(i=0;i <argc;i++)
printf("argv[%d]=%s\n",i,argv[i]); return 0; }

\---- VHDL example (from de.wikipedia) ----

    
    
      ENTITY DFlipflop IS
        PORT(D,Clk: IN Bit;
             Q: OUT Bit);
      END DFlipflop;
      ARCHITECTURE Behav OF DFlipflop IS 
          CONSTANT T_Clk_Q: time := 4.23 ns;
      BEGIN 
          PROCESS
          BEGIN
             WAIT UNTIL Clk'EVENT AND Clk='1';
             Q <= D AFTER T_Clk_Q;
          END PROCESS;
      END Behav;

------
armon
I work at Kiip, where we write primarily in Python, Erlang and C. We have
built several in-house analytics systems than can handle upwards of 300K qps.
We are hiring too: <http://kiip.me/jobs>

------
GFKjunior
I too would like to know. I want to move to the Bay Area a.s.a.p. and am
looking for startups where it is one of the primary tools.

------
rahulcs
Gluster(which was a startup, now acquired by Redhat, now called Redhat
Storage) writes its GlusterFS in C. They use C heavily.

------
brewerhimself
Mixpanel's "Jobs" page says they write C, Python, and JavaScript heavily.

~~~
lopatin
They wrote their own data store so I'm assuming that was one of the things
that C was important for.

