Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 13th Feb 2009 16:19 UTC, submitted by ShlomiFish
General Development There's a new essay called "Optimizing Code for Speed" available on Shlomi Fish's site. It covers the motivation, methods and terminology of optimizing code, and provides many links and examples to illustrate this important subject.
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Algorithmics...
by werfu on Sat 14th Feb 2009 22:39 UTC
werfu
Member since:
2005-09-15

Before I took the Algorithmic course in my Computer Science BSc, I never had an idea why some algos where faster than other. Once you get to understand what is O(n log n) and why it is faster than O(n³), it change a lot the way you code. Doing something right is not because it works ok, but because you're efficient doing it. People may say that today we have plenty of Ghz to spare, but in this age of processing power efficiency, optimized code is important. The problems however is not about doing algos, there is course for this. Most algos are well documented and have been know for a while. Nowadays, most compiler have builtin optimizer that can recognize patterns. Optimization is now more of: how can I get my code to stay longer in the processor cache, how I can make better us of disk IO, how can I parallize my application?

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