What does HackerNews think of mysql-server?

> This was a single paragraph in a large blog post, why the heck would I be including a detailed analysis of how I reached that conclusion? On one out of dozens of compile-time regressions I investigated? Something I do all the time, and am likely an expert on?

Yes, when you make a questionable claim and you do not provide any evidence or whatsoever on how you reached to that conclusion, you should be ready to be challenged. Especially given the fact that this is a _technical_ blog targeted to people with technical expertise.

You also take the occasion in the article to subtly confuse the uneducated readers by saying

> In particular, the large regression on the right is due to enabling C++17 by default.

as it is some sort of an universal truth that all C++ code bases will risk if they switch to C++17, which I will counterpoint later in my comment with a real-world multi-million LoC C++ project that includes virtually every C++ header in existence (*).

You sort of try to support that claim by saying that bigger sized STL implementation from C++17 is the culprit

> The close to two times slowdown in 7zip O0 builds comes down to STL headers becoming 2-3 times as large in C++17.

and at which point you really got me puzzling because I've worked on C++14 codebases which made the transition to C++17, and some even to C++20, and I never recall discussions taking place because of the build time regression as big as implied by the article. This wouldn't go unnoticed on multi-million LoC projects in a real-world.

But you also continue with a snarky comment such as

> While this is sad, and I had to edit out some choice words on the C++ standardization committee (I hear that this gets even worse in C++20), at least this does not affect non-clang compilers (e.g. Rust) and C code.

You don't provide any constructive criticism nor have I seen you opening the bug for further investigation. All those things create a bad impression and it doesn't seem that your comments are coming from a good place either. It reads as a very biased PoV which is sort of a problem given that you're professionally involved with the work on LLVM, clang and Rust, and along the way you're being paid by RedHat for that type of work.

(*) I've cloned https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server. Whole codebase is roughly around 3M lines of C and C++ code (among other types of source code). I did not do a very scientific experiment because initial results weren't matching what the article has shown but I've ran the RelWithDebInfo builds against {clang, gcc} x {C++14, C++17} and I've repeated that experiment with two different versions of gcc and clang. TL;DR neither clang or gcc build variant do not show a "regression" larger than ~5% in wall-clock time.

1a8a111d8f855a31d0aeffc8f02309b2b82dd410 was an actual point in time when MySQL transitioned from C++14 to C++17, and this commit was used as a base for C++17 builds. 1a8a111d8f855a31d0aeffc8f02309b2b82dd410~1 was used for C++14 builds. No ccache was involved or whatsoever. Everything was dockerized.

Build with gcc-7.3.1: 6m33s (C++14) vs 6m55s (C++17)

Build with clang-5.0.2 3m52s (C++14) vs 3m58s (C++17)

Build with gcc-9.3.1 5m6s (C++14) vs 5m22s (C++17)

Build with clang-8.0.0 4m39s (C++14) vs 4m49s (C++17)

> MySQL (C)

MySQL and MariaDB are a mixed of C++ and C nowadays [^2] [^1]. Most Database reimplementation nowadays are C++, Go or more recently (Rust).

> - message buses: DBus (C)

ZeroMQ is C++, Same for gRPC (reference of RPC nowadays), same for Thrift [^4]

> - games

Almost all triple A use the Unreal Engine or an home made engine in C++. Even Unity that brand itself as C# uses some C++ internally.

> distributed systems

Almost all Distributed system in the HPC world is C++ or Julia nowadays, with a bit of Fortran surviving.

> - AI runtimes

AI means often GPU usage, GPU usage means CUDA, meaning C++. That's valid for the today three main contenders (Tensorflow, pyTorch, MXNet ) and they all provide a python API on top of C++.

> Now let's add one obvious category which was suspiciously left out from this list: operating systems: Unix, BSDs, Linux, Plan 9, Illumos, GNU Mach, Windows NT, XNU --- there is almost no C++ here (and any C++ that there is in just the last two).

C++ is also in Fushia (Google) and BeOS/Haiku. But OS are mainly C (or Rust nowaday) because kernel space. Exception handling is problematic in kernel space.

[^1]: https:/github.com/MariaDB/server [^2]: https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server [^3]: https://zeromq.org/ [^4]: https://github.com/facebook/fbthrift

I haven't benchmarked them, but fd has a recursive parallel directory iterator. ag doesn't.

The mysql-server repository[1] should be a fun one to try out, because of this:

    $ wc -l .gitignore
    3122 .gitignore

The combination of fast glob matching[2] and parallel traversal should be a boon.

[1] - https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server

[2] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/e7c06b92fb996adcb...