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A comment on On the Madness of Optimizing Compilers. Parent comment

Re:On the Madness of Optimizing Compilers by golergka on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @04:33AM (#11244308)
> Code that works 100% of the time is better than higher performant code that explodes in your face every once in a while.

That depends. In game programming, if I had a choice between a render that will crash once every 10 hours and produce 60 fps (in some model envrionment) vs a render that never crashes but produces 45 fps, I would choose the first one.

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Re:On the Madness of Optimizing Compilers by iofj on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @06:15AM (#11244647)
Ditto for math libraries, machine learning libraries + tools, statistics calculations and matrix multiplier kernels.

Hell, I'd take a 1% chance of blowup for a 10% speedup any day.

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Re:On the Madness of Optimizing Compilers by pif on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @06:44AM (#11244709)
> I'd take a 1% chance of blowup for a 10% speedup any day.

Are you serious? Would you base your research career on software that you don't trust? I wouldn't.

Please, notice that 1% chance of full blowup means a not-null probability of nice-looking-but-actually-false results from time to time, and that's a risk no researcher is allowed to accept.

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Re:On the Madness of Optimizing Compilers by iofj on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @10:13AM (#11245665)
> Are you serious? Would you base your research career on software that you don't trust? I wouldn't.

I guess you haven't seen the quality of academic code recently. The choices are basing your credibility on slow badly written code or fast badly written code.

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Re:On the Madness of Optimizing Compilers by 0x07c0 on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @06:52AM (#11244726)
That is what we have fast math for :)
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