Yesterday I wrote about optimisation work flow and in this post I will be discussing why you should not preemptively optimise your program’s source code. You may wonder what could possibly be wrong with preemptively optimising the source code, it just makes your program faster right? And that is the trap: while it does make [...]
I believe the key to optimising any program is measurement: not writing l33t code which seems to be what a lot of programmers think optimisation is! The optimisation process is all about finding the slow parts of your program and speeding those slow parts up by refactoring your source code to meet your target performance [...]
This may seem strange but in my experience it is true that the first few optimisation efforts on any un-optimised system tend to yeild high returns for low effort e.g, tweaking some compiler or linker settings in a few minutes. Further medium term efforts tend to suffer from diminishing returns e.g, rewriting critical sections in [...]