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> Those compilers performed nowhere near the level of optimization that modern compilers do. I think this gets at Wirth's law a bit. Yes compilers perform lots

> Those compilers performed nowhere near the level of optimization that modern compilers do. I think this gets at Wirth's law a bit. Yes compilers perform lots of optimizations now, but in Rust's case it is at least partly because they need to in order to claw back the performance that the Rust gives up with its abstraction (as seen in debug builds). I do much prefer Rust's safe abstractions to writing more direct code and hoping I get it right. I hope (and do believe) that the MIR effort will somewhat rein in the burden shunted over to LLVM, as it is super painful for some of us.

civility 9y ago
> I think this gets at Wirth's law a bit. I think Proebsting's law is also relevant. Compilers did an impressive job of optimization in the 90s, and while yes there have been advancements in the last 18 years, it's foolish to over-estimate the progress. Also, considering how much hardware changes have improved performance (speculative execution, register renaming, etc...), it wouldn't surprise me if many compiler optimizations have become less important with time. For instance, peep-hole instruction scheduling has to matter less than it once did.