Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by almostgotcaught 535 days ago
vast majority doesn't even begin to describe it - i would wager 10 years of my salary that the fraction of all currently running CPU instructions that were handwritten is so small that it's within the margin of error (i.e., random bit flips) for whatever computer you use to perform the count.
1 comments

Depending on how you count, the ratio might not be that small. A lot of hot code are written in hand-coded inline assembly, so in terms of CPU cycles run it's probably non-negligible.

i.e. take a look at the glibc implementation of 'strcmp` [0]

[0] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/x86_64/m...

Now how much of that doesn't interface with compiler generated code?
> A lot of hot code are written in hand-coded inline assembly

I know... I write GPU assembly for a living... And still I make that wager. It's not a lot. It's not even a little. It's an epsilon (overall). And it gets smaller over time.

What do you think the percentage of computation is with respect to hand-written vs compiler generated?

If small hot loops tend to be disproportionately hand written, and certain programs spend the majority of time in their hot loops, that could still be a decent percentage of time/instructions executed.