News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on FreeBSD spends 7% of its boot time running a bubblesort on its SYSINITs. Parent comment

Re:FreeBSD spends 7% of its boot time running a bubblesort o... by yjftsjthsd-h on Friday May 19, 2023 @12:05PM (#36003542)
Most of them? If the instructor doesn't call out the difference and point out that all terms of a O() expression have invisible but important constants tacked on, it's easy to accidentally conflate scaling complexity with actual total speed.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:FreeBSD spends 7% of its boot time running a bubblesort o... by bee_rider on Friday May 19, 2023 @01:59PM (#36004949)
Why would the instructor skip that part of the the definition? Giving out wrong definitions as a prank or something?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:FreeBSD spends 7% of its boot time running a bubblesort o... by yjftsjthsd-h on Friday May 19, 2023 @02:12PM (#36005080)
They're not intentionally avoiding it, they just get caught up in the mathematical angle and only mention its (dis)connection to real execution time in a passing comment if at all. Or they might even mention that there are constants in play... and then say that of course since they're constants we can ignore them for the purposes of O() notation. It's the difference between learning from PHDs and engineers, I suppose.
[ Parent | on HN ]