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by ryandrake 1112 days ago
My experience of programming as a Junior Software Engineer in the '90s was replacing inner loops with inline assembly, avoiding cache misses (keep your code in the L1 cache) and making sure your memory accesses stayed on one page. Nobody seems to care even in the slightest about this stuff anymore, and the abysmal performance of modern software shows it.

During the last 30 years, everyone's focus has drifted up the stack, to higher and higher levels of abstraction and higher and higher level languages, to the point where we are totally divorced from the electrons and realities of the underlying hardware.

2 comments

Certain industries still care about this stuff. Some trading firms rely on performant systems which utilize strategies like what you described. Not everything is in hardware and it varies from place to place
There's a lot of places that care about performance now, but in many if them, instead of optimizing your own business logic, you would be building performant platforms so that others could build their own business logic on top of them, be it V8 or Unreal.

Honestly, I think that this separation of concerns makes much more sense.