Re:Making the obvious code fast (2016)
by emsy on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @09:57AM
(#19682581)
Tangential to Jon Blow mentioned in the post is the Handmade Network, which advocates for better programming by sticking closer to the hardware. While I think this is a worthwhile and noble effort, I think what this post really shows is that we need better tools to help developers to do the right thing more effortlessly.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Making the obvious code fast (2016)
by jstimpfle on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @10:31AM
(#19682870)
What is "the right thing", though? When requirements get more and more complex, "better tools" stop working. Their built-in mechanisms are not the answer to anything and everything. Beyond some complexity treshold, you can't do with generic solutions, but need to tailor solutions to the problem.
There is no hidden depth in "the right thing": perform the intended action with as little time/memory complexity as possible. I disagree completely with what you're saying. If anything, the examples in the post show we still have a lot of opportunities to build better tools at the micro level. We didn't even try To build better tools for complex systems yet.
Re:Making the obvious code fast (2016)
by jstimpfle on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @04:13PM
(#19686073)
The "micro level" is almost completely irrelevant. Performance comes from doing the right thing globally, and it will be a long time before tools can help there.
I conjecture that apart from a few artificial benchmarks, the choice of the different approaches here is totally irrelevant. Just don't use the 10000ms approach, and you won't notice a difference in 99% of the real world applications.