This is still funny.
It is certainly a logical fallacy.
No proof has been given that because something is difficult it is necessarily the correct course of action. And no proof can ever be given, because its an argument without merit or reason.
Logically prove to me that the best course of action is always the hardest and I'll donate my organs to charity here and now.
I'm not arguing against the merits of C++, which I think is a worthy language that has its place, rather the blind assumption that its the best language for that ill defined thing - "performance".
Your examples aren't particularly compelling. Facebook did indeed compile PHP. but most of the PHP execution time is in C modules anyway, so they are optimising whats left. True, this emotionally feels imperfect, but at 500 million users, it seems to be holding its own....
Twitter hit a big wall in their custom message processing engine they'd written in ruby. They went for scala as a replacement. This is a relatively new, functional, language that runs on the JVM. It has a very well developed actor framework and other multithreading capabilities that make it very good for writing message/ event based systems (strangely, some similar concepts as in Node.js). Its been found to be good for message processing, as given its functional nature, messages can be immutable. Code will then not need any memory sychronisation to manage shared state between threads, as there is no possibility of corruption.
The JVM platform is fast, memory hungry and robust.
It is an appropriate language/ platform for what they wanted.
Given 2 theoretical architectures, one scala/ immutable message based, and the other C++ using shared memory with mutexes, semaphore and what not.
The scala one will completely wipe the floor with the C++ one no matter how clever you are with STL metaprogramming, because memory synchronisation is expensive in any language.
The correct architectural/ algorithmic decision here will totally rule which solution wins, not the language per se.
Some things need hyper efficient code that keeps the power usage down; but then, why not use C? or assembly? Heck, use C and GPU/ CUDA or something else to make your system scream? Why the obsession with C++?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
