4 ms·

To quote one of the first engineers I ever worked with: "all problems can be solved with an additional layer of abstraction." except performance problems, of c

• BigZaphod 17y ago
  "except performance problems, of course." Well, in some ways, even those can be solved with abstraction. The key is where that abstraction layer is placed. :) The assumption is you add them "on top" of what came before; but if you go in the other direction you may be able to improve performance by implementing, say, a smarter CPU with higher level abstractions built into the silicon. Things like that.
  • lucifer 17y ago
    If a problem is so critical that one of its side-effects earns the title "the vietnam of computer science", then I think it is 'ok' to put "performance" considerations on a secondary tier and first see if there is a solution to the problem, in principle.
  • olavk 17y ago
    High level languages is also an example. C is really an abstraction layer upon machine code, but in most cases compilers produce faster code than what you would do if you wrote assembler. So C is an abstraction layer that helps you improve performance.
• lucifer 17y ago
  Then you seem to misunderstand the point. It is not a N+1 approach. There is a bound to N and that is 4.