Performance

Note: You can read Russian translation here. I have always wanted the Cone compiler to be fast. Faster build times make it easier and more pleasant for the programmer to iterate and experiment quickly. Compilers built for speed, such as Turbo Pascal, D and Go, win praise and loyalty. Languages that struggle more with this, like C++ or Rust, get regular complaints and requests to speed up build times.

The decades-long golden age of Moore’s Law is fading. Slow, bloated software will find it increasingly difficult to hide behind the skirt of ever-faster computer hardware. Given that businesses and users will not yield on their demand for speedy software, developers will need to get a lot better at architecting for performance. In his excellent article on Performance Culture, Joe Duffy begins: “Performance is one of the key pillars of software engineering, and is something that’s hard to do right, and sometimes even difficult to recognize.