Modern processors commonly have 8MB of L2 and 16MB or even more of L3 cache. Shaving 10kb off a binary is meaningless.
Modern hard drives have gigabytes of storage, so shaving 100 characters of a source code is pointless. I always thought code golf was for fun more than anything.
Re:9 Hole Code Golf Challenge
by userbinator on Thursday January 02, 2014 @09:34AM
(#6999703)
...shared among all the processes in the system. Having 8MB of cache to yourself may seem like a lot, but share it equally with 100 others and you're left with ~80KB.
Also, I think it's not quite so impressive to see a 100-byte source file turn into a few hundred KB or few MB binary as it is to see what could be done in a 64K, 4K, or even 256 bytes binary.