But what when people care ? I work in a field where individuals regularly spend 4 to 5 figures for a new CPU for a half-percent of single-core performance improvement ; computers will literally never be fast enough for what we want to do with them so our job is to leave exactly zero possibility for improvement through software
If you care about it, then obviously go to town on optimization, use an FPGA, whatever. But I notice you said 'CPU', which means there is a performance/cost tradeoff even in your field. Otherwise wouldn't you be using specialized hardware?
When we are talking about a general-purpose language like OCaml, then you come in talking about extreme HPC–you must realize it's not relevant in the discussion? Would you comment on threads about Golang talking about how it's not appropriate for HPC usecases?
I mean, yes, FPGAs and dedicated hardware are researched and used in that field.
The main reason CPUs are used "more" is due rather to convenience, and what people want to do not easily being doable on an FPGA ; for instance one of the often used programming languages there (Faust) just got an experimental FPGA port after 20+ years of existence.
But when talking about performance the point is to extract the absolute most performance possible of a given hardware, because you are building a product and you can only afford a.g. some ARM chip and need to get the most out of it to make your product's price fit for its target demographic (to, you know, make money for your business).
In particular, the main "competition" in that field is analog hardware which does not have "performance" issues (but others instead : an analog guitar distortion does not have latency but it does raise the noise floor in the signal) - everyone wants the best of both worlds and it is our job to make it happen
