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by unwind 5079 days ago
Except for games and some build cycles, I'm almost never waiting because the CPU has maxed out.

That's just ... Weird. What would "maxing out" even mean for a CPU? Going "fast enough", somehow? Maybe because build cycles is exactly what I do a lot of my time in front of a computer, I really don't think CPU:s are ever going to be "fast enough". Even if just doing "ordinary computing", I often think e.g. browsers and office applications are rather slow.
2 comments
gaius 5079 days ago
What I would like to be able to do, instead of -O1, -O2 -O3 flags to a compiler is for the "optimization level" to be measured in seconds. So -O1 would run the optimizer for 1 second and give me the best optimized code it could come up with in that time. -O3600 would let the machine think about it for an hour, using any and all heuristics and empirical tests and then giving me what it had at the end. Pre-release, I might want to run the optimizer for a week.
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Maro 5079 days ago
> Pre-release, I might want to run the optimizer for a week.

That's a dangerous model, as certain classes of bugs would only come out in the super-optimized version, but that version would presumably not get the same amount of testing as the regular builds.

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bunderbunder 5079 days ago
It's amazing how much of that stuff isn't really the CPU's fault, though. For example, buying a solid-state drive and moving all my projects over to it has done things that are almost magical to my build times.

(Granted, my C++ days are behind me so particularly CPU-intensive builds just don't really happen to me anymore.)

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