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Startup Founder: Why I Chose C++
C++ bashing [cio.com] is a fashionable [l-w.ca] sport [dorinlazar.ro] these days, but the middle-aged programming language is still often chosen for large (>1M LOC) system programming projects in user space, such as database systems or video games. Startup founder James Perry blogs about the decision to use C++/14 [medium.com] to code his company's cloud-based OLAP (multidimensional analytical database) system. His company using high-performance open source shared libraries and HTTP server technology from Facebook [facebook.com] as a substitute or complement to those provided by either the C++ standard or by Boost [theboostcpplibraries.com] (which could be considered a near-standard).
But why bother with the arcane syntax of C++ and the hassles of third party libraries, when there are other languages which provide comprehensive library support out of the box, and are much more developer friendly? Perry says the reason is performance:
I quantified that 1 C++ server is roughly equivalent to 40 load-balanced python servers for raw computational power based on our HTTP benchmarking. Thus using C++ can really squeeze all the computational juice out of the underlying hardware to save 1/40 off server costs. I guess we could have written it in Python to start off with but, economically, it would be a wastage of labor cost and time because, at some stage, we would have to scrap it for a C++ version to get the performance we need. The Python code will have no economic value once scrapped.
