What Challenges and Trade-Offs Do Optimising Compilers Face?

Re:What Challenges and Trade-Offs Do Optimising Compilers Face? by azakai on Thursday June 22, 2017 @11:58AM (#14613144)

The article focuses on throughput performance, which is obviously very important, but maybe it's also worth mentioning that code size matters a lot in some cases, like delivering code on the web.

If an optimizing compiler can reduce code size by 50%, that's extremely useful, and as opposed to throughput optimization for which perhaps only a few small methods matter, for code size the whole program matters, so humans can't compete with compilers there.

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Re:What Challenges and Trade-Offs Do Optimising Compilers Face? by mpweiher on Thursday June 22, 2017 @12:05PM (#14613192)

Not just that, for many, many applications these days, latency and predictability are more important than throughput.

And throughput is actually easier (see: Latency Lags Bandwidth). So we're often/usually getting help with the less important problem that's easier to solve, while at the same time making the more important and harder problems more difficult.

YMMV.

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