On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 11:51:33AM +0100, Cameron Logie wrote > Following on from the debate last night about slow software on high spec > machines, don't you think that developers of 3 or 4 years ago were, > perhaps, more prepared to use lower level programming languages to gain > additional speed ?
Three things: 1. C is /still/ the most used programming language, for god only knows what reason, and you don't get muhch lower level than semi-portable asm. 2. High level languages like python can, in theory, be much quicker than low level languages: http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html 3. Language choice is totally epsilon compared to algorithim choice, the difference between C and Python is prolly in the order of 10% at worst, the difference between a skip list and a linked list is so much more. > Maybe another problem is that compiler optimisations aren't being fully > exploited so that the software can run on any x86 box. > I wonder what a 686 optimised version of Word would be like, for example. again, compiler optimisation won't get you anything like the speedup that proper algorithim choice will. - Aidan -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.velvet.net/~aidan/ aim:aidans42 http://www.livejournal.com/users/aidan_skinner/ finger for pgp key: 01AA 1594 2DB0 09E3 B850 C2D0 9A2C 4CC9 3EC4 75E1
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