Slashdot Mirror
Programming As If Performance Mattered
Junks Jerzey writes "Saw the essay 'Programming as if Performance Mattered', by James Hague, mentioned at the Lambda the Ultimate programming language weblog. This is the first modern and sensible spin on how optimization has changed over the years. The big 'gotcha' in the middle caught me by surprise. An inspiring read." Hague begins: "Are particular performance problems perennial? Can we never escape them? This essay is an attempt to look at things from a different point of view, to put performance into proper perspective."
Thanks for your reply. At least now I know there are some realistic coders left in this world. I cannot agree with you more! Stacking inefficient code on top of each other will impede overall performance MUCH faster than hardware manufacturers can keep up with. There is at least an elegance and huge amount of satisfaction associated with doing things right.
The guy even quantitatively stated that 20 bytes or pixels or whatever turned into 1200 bytes or some thing over 3 or 4 transformations.. and he wrote a library to read tiff's for use in opengl? well one could ONLY imagine what would happen if that algorithm was used to load all the textures and images for quake 3 or something.. it would take days to even load that stuff, and forget about loading it on the fly! the only way would be to what, cache the images in memory? haha
Your short paragraph-long example delivered a better and more concise argument about efficiency than that hippie attempted to do in a whole essay. Frankly I'm quite disturbed crap like this gets posted on developers.slashdot.