A lot of that boils down to picking an algorithm that lets them defer as much work as possible until you know you need to do it. I suppose that's one of lazy evaluation's claims to fame, but I think the level reached in Grep would be difficult to achieve in a more modern functional lannguage.
Heh... I don't know that I qualify as an 'old timer', but it's been a while since 'whippersnapper' would've applied to me. :-)
> The few times that I really needed performance out of a particular C/C++ function
For me, at least, performance has almost never been a problem, particularly when writing in C.
> I don't see a lot of "optimized C" in the wc impl. I'd imagine that wc optimised for use in a GPU would be pretty spectacular,
Whenever I think of optimized C code, I immediately think of the work done to make Gnu Grep fast.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...
A lot of that boils down to picking an algorithm that lets them defer as much work as possible until you know you need to do it. I suppose that's one of lazy evaluation's claims to fame, but I think the level reached in Grep would be difficult to achieve in a more modern functional lannguage.