Re:Say Hello to X64 Assembly Part 3
by userbinator on Saturday September 20, 2014 @03:30AM
(#8343948)
I don't care whether your developer time is costlier than compiler time, I need the software to work as fast as it can only constrained by the specifications of my machine.
I can't agree more. Many programmers are traditionally taught that optimisation is some sort of "last moment" effort for when thing are seriously bloated and slow and that programmer time is more expensive than machine time, and it seems all this does is breed a lazy, selfish attitude; yes, it's very likely not worth expending an hour or even 10 minutes to optimise a throwaway script that's used by yourself and isn't a bottleneck in your process, but when your software is used by hundreds, thousands, or even millions or more users worldwide, who are often paying users, it doesn't seem nice at all to be making them all wait or be forced to buy newer hardware just so you can "save" a bit of work that you should be doing anyway.
I can't agree more. Many programmers are traditionally taught that optimisation is some sort of "last moment" effort for when thing are seriously bloated and slow and that programmer time is more expensive than machine time, and it seems all this does is breed a lazy, selfish attitude; yes, it's very likely not worth expending an hour or even 10 minutes to optimise a throwaway script that's used by yourself and isn't a bottleneck in your process, but when your software is used by hundreds, thousands, or even millions or more users worldwide, who are often paying users, it doesn't seem nice at all to be making them all wait or be forced to buy newer hardware just so you can "save" a bit of work that you should be doing anyway.
It's like http://xkcd.com/1205/ , multiplied by the size of the userbase.