Re:What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (2007) [pdf]
by cortesoft on Monday March 04, 2019 @06:05PM
(#19306559)
Right, the question then becomes "What percentage of programmers are going to need to optimize code beyond the lowest hanging fruit"
I don't know exactly what that number is going to be, but I do know it is going to be a lot less than 100%.
My list presupposes you've hit a wall and need the best performance you can get. That's not always the case, but I certainly wouldn't say that these optimizations don't make a difference in the "real world of softare."
False sharing alone can be the difference between a 16x parallelization speedup and a 1000x+ slowdown over the naive serial algorithm. 16x can be the difference between actionable results tomorrow or three weeks from today... and if you didn't know about it, the 1000x+ slowdown would be otherwise inscrutable.