Transcript from Coders at Work interview with Joshua Block:
Seibel: As a Java guy at Google, do you think it could be used more? Leaving aside the force of history and historical choices, if somehow you could wave a magic wand and replace all of C++ with Java, could that work?
Bloch: Up to a point. Large parts of the system could be written that way, and over time, things are moving in that direction. But for the absolute core of the system - the inner loops of the index servers, for instance - very small gains in performance are worth an awful lot. When you have that many machines running the same piece of code, if you can make it even a few percent faster, then you've done something that has real benefits, financially and enviromentally. So there is some code that you want to write in assembly language, and what is C but glorified assembly language?
Seibel: As a Java guy at Google, do you think it could be used more? Leaving aside the force of history and historical choices, if somehow you could wave a magic wand and replace all of C++ with Java, could that work?
Bloch: Up to a point. Large parts of the system could be written that way, and over time, things are moving in that direction. But for the absolute core of the system - the inner loops of the index servers, for instance - very small gains in performance are worth an awful lot. When you have that many machines running the same piece of code, if you can make it even a few percent faster, then you've done something that has real benefits, financially and enviromentally. So there is some code that you want to write in assembly language, and what is C but glorified assembly language?