Security quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Security quotes of the week

Posted Apr 26, 2018 6:29 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: Security quotes of the week by mjthayer
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

> Given that most code in most projects is not expected to be performance-critical, I always wonder anyway why people waste time and fossil fuel (and risk uncovering assumptions in their code they would rather not have known about) optimising it build after build.

Perhaps some day compilers will learn to detect code paths which will not benefit from optimisations and optimise them away...

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Security quotes of the week

Posted Apr 26, 2018 7:08 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

> Perhaps some day compilers will learn to detect code paths which will not benefit from optimisations and optimise them away...

Maybe, but at the cost of making them slower still. In the mean time, programmers could be doing a decent work at this right now, if they just were aware of the problem.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Apr 26, 2018 7:35 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> Maybe, but at the cost of making them slower still. In the mean time, programmers could be doing a decent work at this right now, if they just were aware of the problem.

Quite agree there. I was just wondering whether making compilers learn when not to optimise might be more of a fun/challenging task for compiler writers than deciding which code to optimise or not for programmers, and therefore more likely to happen. Then again, optimising build time has become fashionable lately, so perhaps there is hope.