Re:Ask HN: Was programming more interesting when memory usag...
by throw_away_8080 on Sunday April 02, 2023 @08:50PM
(#35417157)
I have changed a program to use a smaller struct in a recursive function call and improved the speed significantly.
I did measure so I can't say why for sure, but it was satisfying to see the exact same algorithm go faster.
I assume it was because it had better cache performance.
Re:Ask HN: Was programming more interesting when memory usag...
by nextaccountic on Sunday April 02, 2023 @09:11PM
(#35417320)
A lot of effort is spent to reduce the size of structs in the Rust compiler
https://nnethercote.github.io/2023/03/24/how-to-speed-up-the...
3% and 6% of improvement doesn't seem like much, but at the level of rustc those big wins
Performance of Rustc must be continously tracked (here https://perf.rust-lang.org/) because if you don't proactively fight against bloat, the tendency is that the code will become slower over time (due to new features etc)
Re:Ask HN: Was programming more interesting when memory usag...
by shortrounddev on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @07:57AM
(#35438188)
> For anything that isn't IO bound
It seems like most things are web services these days though
For anything that isn’t IO bound you are very often bound by memory access time. CPUs are incredibly fast and feeding them data to work on is very difficult, more so today than before!
The big difference is that a category of programming jobs has appeared where this is almost never a concern because it’s about shoving text around between servers.