High Performance Languages

Languages

• C and C++
• Rust
• Fortran

If you want to write fast code, you must pick an efficient language. It might be obvious to you that not every language is created equal. What you might not yet know is that while one language may be the best at a particular task, it doesn't mean that it's the best at every task. The language references listed on this page doesn't mean that those languages are the best at everything. However, they are are very good at most things.

Based on the current rankings at The Computer Language Benchmarks Game, we can see that C++, C, Rust, ADA and Fortran are the five fastest languages on average. If you dig a bit deeper, you can see that in certain tasks, other languages parallel those in speed, so it's still your responsibility to pick the language appropriate for the task. Below I've listed the best reference material for C and C++, Rust and Fortran. I've chosen to omit Ada in favor of Fortran because Fortran is generally more suited for scientific, engineering and mathematical applications.

C and C++

cppreference is a wiki-style reference for the C and C++ languages. It provides documentation for all of the standard revisions of those languages, from C89 to C17 for C and C++98 to C++20 for C++. It is available in English, Arabic, Czech, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Mandarin. It covers the concepts and specifications of the C and C++ languages, and their standard libraries. It is particularly excellent for its coverage of the C++ standard template library and algorithms library.

Tips for use:

• The search feature can be used to find pages related to concepts, functions, and classes.
• Class pages follow a regular template that includes the namespace, definition, parameters, member types, member functions, and non-member functions of the class.
• Member functions and non-member functions of a class are linked to another page which explains their parameters, the complexities of the function, and include an example of the use of that function.
• These features are also present for functions that are not associated with classes, such as those found in the algorithms library.
• There is a page for C++ and a page for C which contain links to other useful resources for those languages, including FAQs, additional references, and specifications for their ABI (Application Binary Interface).

Top

Rust

The Rust website is the official repository of the Rust language's documentation, compiler binaries, and community portal. Like cppreference, it is also available in other languages besides English, including German, Spanish, French, Indonesia, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese and Mandarin.

The primary means of communication with the developers and other users are via irc (internet relay chat) on Mozilla's irc server. There are a broad variety of channels for different topics, and international channels. Additionally, there are discussion forums available, a YouTube channel for presentations and a listing of the worldwide user groups.

The documentation includes guides to learning Rust, references and project policies. The learning guides include the Rust Programming Language book, a collection of Rust examples on various topics that can be run in browsers, a collection of other resources for learning Rust, and an FAQ. The references include the Standard Library API Reference, documentation for rust programs and libraries (called crates) published on Rust's package repository at crates.io, a guide for using Cargo (Rust's package manager), an index of compiler errors, and release notes.

Tips for use:

• The Rust Programming Language and the collection of examples both can be searched, and include a table of contents on the left side of the page.
• The Rust Standard Library API has a powerful search feature which finds documentation that matches the query.
• Pages include the definition of a type or function, examples of its use, relevant macros, other associated documentation (e.g. std::vec::Vec includes information about slicing, capacity and reallocation, and guarantees), and methods with examples of their use.
• The documentation for crates are structured identically to the Standard Library's API. Crates can be searched for on Docs.rs. Crates include a link to their documentation and a single sentence summarizing what they provide.

Top

Fortran

The Fortran 90 reference links to a summary of the language, the language features, and the standards for FORTRAN 77, Fortran 95, Fortran 2003 and Fotran 2008, and provides resources for best practices, examples demonstrating how to write equivalent Python programs in Fortran, an FAQ, and a list of common mistakes programmers make in Fortran (gotchas).

The best practices includes a style guide which covers:

• Naming Conventions
• How to Write Floating Point Numbers
• Integer Division
• Modules and Programs
• Arrays, Multidimensional Arrays and Element-Wise Operations on Arrays
• File I/O
• Interfacing with C and Python
• Callbacks
• Type Casting
• Parallel Programming

Tips for use:

• Individual sections can be navigated most easily by using the links in the table of contents to jump to the section you want to look at. When you're done with that section, click on the browser's back button to return to the table of contents at the top of the page to pick your next topic.
• The Python Fortran Rosetta Stone describes how to translate snippets of Python to Fortran, and is organized by topic such as math, strings, and nested functions.

Top