> Famously, he also strictly enforced his simplicity also on the compilers, by insisting that e.g. things like optimizations should "pay for themselves" by spee

> Famously, he also strictly enforced his simplicity also on the compilers, by insisting that e.g. things like optimizations should "pay for themselves" by speeding up the compilation of the compiler itself more than the extra code in the compiler would slow it down I thought I remembered a similar approach being recommended on the Conclusions page of the Computer Language Benchmarks Game, and it turns out it's a direct reference to Wirth [1]: > In order to find the optimal cost/benefit ratio, Wirth used a highly intuitive metric, the origin of which is unknown to me but that may very well be Wirth's own invention. He used the compiler's self-compilation speed as a measure of the compiler's quality. Considering that Wirth's compilers were written in the languages they compiled, and that compilers are substantial and non-trivial pieces of software in their own right, this introduced a highly practical benchmark that directly contested a compiler's complexity against its performance. Under the self compilation speed benchmark, only those optimizations were allowed to be incorporated into a compiler that accelerated it by so much that the intrinsic cost of the new code addition was fully compensated. [1] https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclusions.html#ultimate-benchmark https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclu...