Real-life optimization work [LWN.net]

Real-life optimization work

Posted Nov 6, 2005 0:58 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Real-life optimization work by zblaxell
Parent article: All hail the speed demons (O'Reillynet)

Are you /sure/ it wouldn't do more?

You see, it's so easy to write a Unicode-enabled, locale-sensitive program that you might easily do so by accident. Your new program might, without you really intending it, support a lot of extra things that a lot of people (maybe even you) would find useful. Things which weren't so much missing from the original as simply never considered. Remember also that the OS support functions are much more powerful and robust than their equivalents on your 6809. Depending on the APIs used your "save file" routine may magically support saving a compressed file, over the network, with automatic versioning...

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Real-life optimization work

Posted Nov 8, 2005 8:21 UTC (Tue) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

You forgot to mention bloated things like file permissions and multiple terminals. :)

Also, Unix code (meaning all those things the grandparent eschewed, like malloc and localtime) written in 1989-1991 would take a couple days to port to a modern GNU/Linux distribution. And probably only a few days to port to whatever comes 15 years from now.

So would it do more? Yeah. To start with, it would run in the first place. And without that ability, source code of any size is worthless.