On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 10:25:06AM -0500, James Mastros wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 03:41:42PM -0800, Hong Zhang wrote:
> > Are we over-optimizing? The Perl is just an interpreter language.
> > Who really needs this kind of optimization for Perl? Even C does
> > not provide this feature.
> Umm, art thou sure? C can optimize better then we currently do many times,
Somewhat tangentially: this reminds me of a message a week ago or so
(can't find it anymore in my inbox) which proposed writing C (or C++)
code for Perl 6 so that "modern CPU architectures are happy" (no
pipeline stalls because of "if"-s, etc.) Hello? This is a very
high-level language we are writing, not a DSP core. Optimizing by
choosing good algorithms and data structures, yes, microoptimizing,
maybe, only after the code works first, and even then we would be
following the mirage since CPU architectures do evolve, and in
general, for large codebases, the C compilers are much, much, better
in optimizing than humans. Yes, a human can sit down and read
the databooks and optimize a simple algorithm to hell and back.
But megabytes of source code? Get real.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
