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Cassandra Rewritten In C++, Ten Times Faster

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

urdak writes: At Cassandra Summit opening today, Avi Kivity and Dor Laor (who had previously written KVM and OSv) announced ScyllaDB — an open-source C++ rewrite of Cassandra, the popular NoSQL database. ScyllaDB claims to achieve a whopping 10 times more throughput per node than the original Java code, with sub-millisecond 99%ile latency. They even measured 1 million transactions per second on a single node. The performance of the new code is attributed to writing it in Seastar — a C++ framework for writing complex asynchronous applications with optimal performance on modern hardware.

3 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Because it was written in Seastar or C++ by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would say that 95% of all people I know in person, who learned C first and not: Assembler, Pascal, SmallTalk, Lisp are extremely bad on advanced language concepts like functional or oo programming. Most of them shifted to scripting and operating servers and don't "code". A minority is doing embedded programming in C++ which mainly looks like C.

    The idea that learning C first has any advantage is completely bollocks, a /. myth.

    I started with C in 1987 ... on Sun Solaris (after 6 years Assembler, Pascal and BASIC) ... 1989 I switched to C++. I never looked back.

    Only masochists would look back at C of that period.

    ANSI C is much better ... but still: when I see a self proclaimed C genius with 30 years experience program Java or C++ ... shudder.

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  2. Re:Garbage collected virtual machines! by fragMasterFlash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "C++ is my favorite garbage collected language because it generates so little garbage"

    -Bjarne Stroustrup

  3. Re:Lies! by NostalgiaForInfinity · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It comes from an old (15+ years) defense of Java. The claim was that Java was no longer slow thank to JIT, with HotSpot making it possible for Java code to run faster than equivalent code written in C or C++.

    High performance software requires several things, among them good native code generation and good libraries. Java used to have neither, then it got the JIT. Unfortunately, Java's semantics and built-in data types make writing high performance software in it really hard.

    C++ started out with good native code generation, and its standard library and built in data types make writing high performance software a bit easier if you know what you are doing. Most C++ programmers don't know what they are doing, though, so their software ends up bloated and inefficient anyway.