Earlier quoted context omitted.
It‘s still interesting to see how certain challenges have been solved back in the day. Or as a case study in what _not_ to do today. For example, Quake‘s ingame console commands were stored in a linked list. I believe looking up a command was a linear search through that list. You wouldn‘t do it like that today.
I don’t know about quake, but in quake 2 it consisted of a big list of: else if (strcmp(cmd, “somecmd”) == 0) somecmd() I remember reading it at the time and being inspired by the simplicity of it. It didn’t need to be more complicated than it was, and so Carmack didn’t make it more complicated. That was in stark contrast to a lot of the object oriented c++ design stuff that I was also reading at the time. So much of…
People famous for optimization also know where it matters. Optimization obscures.