> Optimisers are like garbage collectors—they give you better ergonomics than, and equal average performance to the manual alternative, if you’re willing to rel

> Optimisers are like garbage collectors—they give you better ergonomics than, and equal average performance to the manual alternative, if you’re willing to relinquish predictability and a non-voodoo mental model of your code’s performance. This is why I'd like to see optimizers become less opaque. It would be great if we could not only suggest optimizations to the compiler (and more sophisticated ones that just inlining), but actually see the process which our code went through. One language that has some interesting things going on in this area is Nim, which lets you write your own domain-specific optimizations[1]. [1]: http://hookrace.net/blog/what-is-special-about-nim/#add-your-own-optimizations-to-the-compiler http://hookrace.net/blog/what-is-special-about-nim/#add-your...