Attack of the Killer Microseconds
Really?  We are good at nanoseconds and milliseconds but not at microseconds?  Last I checked a microsecond was 1000 nanoseconds so you can&#x27;t really be good at nanoseconds but somehow bad at microseconds.<p>This ties in a little to the recent HN discussions about the cost of a context switch.  I think what they&#x27;re trying to say, and not very well, is that there is somewhat of a discontinuity when you move between different levels of abstraction.  There&#x27;s examples of this phenomena in operating systems where the overhead of making a system call can be so high you can&#x27;t get the latency down or in programming languages, e.g. running over a virtual machine or an interpreter.  But this is far from new and there&#x27;s a continuum of solutions from hardware like DSPs through real time operating systems, lightweight threads, lower lever languages, kernel bypass.  Abstractions have cost, you want protected&#x2F;virtual memory there&#x27;s a cost and you pay that cost in your context switches.  Not sure you can have your cake and eat it here but there&#x27;s plenty of different choices on the menu for different situations.