Logic vs. Array Processing

Back and forth and back and forth. The fact is, they're both right, and here's why. I mentally separate code into either of two categories, logic or array processing:

Often the line is blurry, but array processing involves running a relatively small set of rules over a lot of homogenous data. Computers are very, very good at this kind of computation, and specialized hardware such as a GPU can increase performance by orders of magnitude. Ignoring memory bandwidth, a desktop CPU can multiply billions of floating point numbers per second, and a fast GPU can multiply trillions.

At the other extreme, logic code tends to be full of branches, function calls, dependent memory accesses, and often it executes code that hasn't been run in minutes. Just think about the set of operations that happen when you open a file in Word. Computers aren't so good at these types of operations, and as Moore's Law continues, they tend not to improve as rapidly as array computation does.

Back to Java vs. C++. The synthetic benchmarks that compare Java and C++ performance tend to be tight loops, simply because accurate measurement requires it. This gives the JVM time to prime its JIT/prediction engines/what have you, so I'd expect a good result. Heck, I'd expect a good result from the modern JavaScript tracing engines.*

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