Fast software is a discipline, not a purpose

Post by stormking » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 1:09 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #48

hasenj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote is so misunderstood and so abused all the time. The point of the statement is to not micro-optimize this and that corner of the program without having any data to guide you on what you should optimize and how. It's not a rallying call to forgo all concerns about application performance and efficiency. The mis-application of this quote is the root of all evil in modern software IMO. It's why a chat program…

> 1. Make it work correctly and efficiently (to a reasonable degree) Unfortunately, this took your team 6 months and the people that launched their app 4 months ago (having opted for "make it work") now have 90% of your market and you've all just been made redundant because the customers do not care whether your app is "more correct" and "more efficient" because they just plain damn couldn't use it. There's a reason…

Post by gopalv » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 7:15 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #22

gopalv wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But integer arithmetic is not necessarily faster than floating point arithmetic in general; GPUs was the first place I feel like floats got a much better pathway than any other data type - graphical pixel manipulations also can get away with much higher arithmetic errors, because it's all going to get rounded down to a pixel eventually. On the other hand, the only place where I've really worked heavily with fixed p…

Come on, all reasonable ARM have NEON and VFPv3 (including cortex M) about the only place I saw something that didn't was an old internet router. Hardware completely unsuited to maths. Softfp does not preclude the use of floating point math at all. It means you pay an extra cost when passing floats as arguments. (Which means you should rather use a hardfp math library if possible.)

Post by hasenj » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 7:15 AM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #60

hasenj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no evidence than any of this is true. First market is not often the winner. Facebook came very late to the social media scene but it dominated. Google came very late to the search engine scene, and people don't even remember this but there was a time when there were a ton of search engines and anyone at the time would probably think that the search engine market is saturated and there's no space for a new pro…

> Chrome completely dominated them on the simple basis that it was _really fast_. It isn't that simple - a lot of Chrome's success came because they "made it work" in ways that Firefox (horribly wasteful of CPU, memory, battery life) and IE (shambles in every department) didn't. Also helped in large part by having an enormous web monopoly pushing it and favouring it for their properties. But you're definitely right t…

Post by zimpenfish » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 11:31 AM UTC

hasenj wrote: post #65

zimpenfish wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome completely dominated them on the simple basis that it was _really fast_. It isn't that simple - a lot of Chrome's success came because they "made it work" in ways that Firefox (horribly wasteful of CPU, memory, battery life) and IE (shambles in every department) didn't. Also helped in large part by having an enormous web monopoly pushing it and favouring it for their properties. But you're definitely right t…

> a lot of Chrome's success came because they "made it work" in ways that Firefox (horribly wasteful of CPU, memory, battery life) Uhh, do you have an ounce of self awareness? Yes, it performed way better than Firefox, which is exactly my point.