I’m currently deciding on a platform to build a scientific computational product on, and am deciding on either C#, Java, or plain C with Intel compiler on Core2 Quad CPU’s. It’s mostly integer arithmetic.
My benchmarks so far show Java and C are about on par with each other, and .NET/C# trails by about 5%- however a number of my coworkers are claiming that .NET with the right optimizations will beat both of these given enough time for the JIT to do its work.
I always assume that the JIT would have done it’s job within a few minutes of the app starting (Probably a few seconds in my case, as it’s mostly tight loops), so I’m not sure whether to believe them
Can anyone shed any light on the situation? Would .NET beat Java? (Or am I best just sticking with C at this point?).
The code is highly multithreaded and data sets are several terabytes in size.
Haskell/Erlang etc are not options in this case as there is a significant quantity of existing legacy C code that will be ported to the new system, and porting C to Java/C# is a lot simpler than to Haskell or Erlang. (Unless of course these provide a significant speedup).
Edit: We are considering moving to C# or Java because they may, in theory, be faster. Every percent we can shave off our processing time saves us tens of thousands of dollars per year. At this point we are just trying to evaluate whether C, Java, or c# would be faster.
The key piece of information in the question is this:
So you need to consider how much it will cost to shave each percent off. If that optimization effort costs tens of thousands of dollars per year, then it isn’t worth doing. You could make a bigger saving by firing a programmer.
With the right skills (which today are rarer and therefore more expensive) you can hand-craft assembler to get the fastest possible code. With slightly less rare (and expensive) skills, you can do almost as well with some really ugly-looking C code. And so on. The more performance you squeeze out of it, the more it will cost you in development effort, and there will be diminishing returns for ever greater effort. If the profit from this stays at ‘tens of thousands of dollars per year’ then there will come a point where it is no longer worth the effort. In fact I would hazard a guess you’re already at that point because ‘tens of thousands of dollars per year’ is in the range of one salary, and probably not enough to buy the skills required to hand-optimize a complex program.
I would guess that if you have code already written in C, the effort of rewriting it all as a direct translation in another language will be 90% wasted effort. It will very likely perform slower simply because you won’t be taking advantage of the capabilities of the platform, but instead working against them, e.g. trying to use Java as if it was C.
Also within your existing code, there will be parts that make a crucial contribution to the running time (they run frequently), and other parts that are totally irrelevant (they run rarely). So if you have some idea for speeding up the program, there is no economic sense in wasting time applying it to the parts of the program that don’t affect the running time.
So use a profiler to find the hot spots, and see where time is being wasted in the existing code.
Update when I noticed the reference to the code being ‘multithreaded’
In that case, if you focus your effort on removing bottlenecks so that your program can scale well over a large number of cores, then it will automatically get faster every year at a rate that will dwarf any other optimization you can make. This time next year, quad cores will be standard on desktops. The year after that, 8 cores will be getting cheaper (I bought one over a year ago for a few thousand dollars), and I would predict that a 32 core machine will cost less than a developer by that time.