On 13/11/06 12:26 +0100, Dave Long wrote: <snip> > (from a 50 year old document)[1] > >There are occasions when it is necessary to write programs which will > >be executed in as little time as possible. The programmer should bear > >in mind that 10,000 executions of all non-optimum instructions would > >take less than 3 minutes longer than 10,000 executions of optimum > >instructions. If the programmer spends 15-30 minutes on each routine > >to save machine time by optimizing, this time may never be made up in > >the actual running of the problem. > The converse is also true. If you are writing code which will be used by a large number of people, saving a few cycles on every run will save a lot of cycles overall. For examples of applications which have programmers working on features rather than performance, see MS Windows, MS Office, Open Office, GNOME.
Devdas Bhagat
