Language Niches (long)

[David Eppstein]

In article <sln9mtgfkd0mdrjbj6vtlihitollc1f4ka at 4ax.com>,
 Courageous <jkraska1 at san.rr.com> wrote:

> Why would anyone ever write anything in C or other standard compiled
> languages? 

I'm not sure you were serious here, but I'll answer anyway:
Because it runs quickly and you have very good control of memory.
E.g. a student here has been working on a program which needs to store a 
small amount of information for a half-billion objects -- easy in C to 
allocate a byte per object in a big array, harder if each object has 
multiple bytes of overhead.  Of course most other languages will let you 
allocate byte arrays but then you lose their object oriented advantages.
And, the program currently runs in around 16 hours -- imagine how much more 
time it might take if written in an interpreted language.
-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/