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by bunderbunder
980 days ago
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I'm generally opposed to unnecessary optimization, but I'm also opposed to this tendency to start flaming as soon as people even talk about optimization. Because sometimes this kind of careful performance tuning, even at the cost of readability, is necessary and desirable. And, for the times when that happens, this kind of information needs to be out there, available, and being discussed, so that people can learn the techniques and understand how to use them properly and responsibly. Yes, that does include knowing that a change to the compiler's optimizer could mean that things that used to make the code faster now make it slower. For that matter, changing the CPU microarchitecture could have the same effect. But that's something we all learn in Optimizing 101. It's so well-known that the very first setting on Godbolt's output pane is a toggle to select which compiler and version it should use to generate said output. |
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Agreed; I think TFA is a useful article. Highly-tuned code is going to be hard to read (it used to be written in assembler, which is at least explicit).
I was simply commenting on the opacity of having two branches in the source that appear to do the same thing, and rely on something outside the code (or the language specification) to achieve the desired performance.