Maybe useless, but the article is extremely intersting and easy to read. One can definitely try to read it. Amusing anecdote : During the very beginning of the

Maybe useless, but the article is extremely intersting and easy to read. One can definitely try to read it. Amusing anecdote : During the very beginning of the 90’s, I happened to code a lot of very optimized code (3D engines) in assembler. I was doing assembler because, well, that was the de facto way to get speed. So at that time, I forgot about the possibility of writing things in C (and I had not access to a C compiler) -- a bit dumb of me. So, one day, tired of writing tedious assembler, and at the same time discovering C, I rewrote one of my assembler program in C. BIG suprise, the C code was much faster than my assembler. So I disassembled the generated code and understood what the compiler did. First, it used very clever bit manipulations (unknown to me) to alter some comparisons I did. Second, it understood that because my code was just a test that didn’t produce anything, then it didn’t need to generate any code. So a big chunk of my C code was just not compiled (and rightly so). So the resulting program, was mostly doing nothing. It was the first time I saw what an optimizing compiler means, I was totally blown away. I was beaten at the optimization game by a program :-) The other thing I understood that day is that an optimizer is no magic. It just carefully applies little knowledge about optimization on little cases here and there. It basically automates what one would have done to optimize some assembler code by hand (except for algorithmic optimization). It also means that one can sleep well knowing that 90% of the chores of optimization are done automatically in a reliable way. We all take that for granted but when I was around 20 years old, it was just super exciting.