3 ms·

I'd argue that you shouldn't be driving a car unless you've rebuilt a transmission yourself, but that argument wouldn't go far.

vvanders 8y ago
That'd be like saying your end user should understand cache misses, however if you're starting a car design/repair shop you might want to know about how transmissions work. The primary reason for dropping down to native is to get better performance. If you're going to do that you'll leave 10x-50x performance on the table if you don't understand cache misses, prefetching and the other things that manual memory placement open up.
- hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
  I'm not going to play anymore metaphor/semantic games. It's nice that you did that project, but it's not at all necessary for someone to engage in that in order to understand performance issues.
  - vvanders 8y ago
    You're the one that raised the metaphor, but okay? I'm not saying that you can't do performance work without having done that. Just that you'll be at a disadvantage since you're at the mercy of whatever your HW vendor decides to disclose to you. If you know this stuff you can work back from from first principals. With a high level memory architecture of a system(say tiled vs direct rendering GPU) you can reason about how certain operations will be fast and will be slow.
    - hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
      You're the one that raised the metaphor, but okay And your response was absurd. You don't rebuild a transmission in order to run a shop. You don't even rebuild a transmission as an engineer creating cars, you shop that out to an organization specializing in the extremely difficult task of designing and building transmissions. I wanted to avoid this waste of time, but here we are. As for the rest of your comment about reasoning about performance, none of that requires the work you did. Again, neat project (for you), but completely unnecessary in general.
Annatar 8y ago
It would be valid, though. A computer programmer must understand how a computer works lest she or he write slow, bloated, inefficient software.
- lmm 8y ago
  Given how many person-years have been saved and how much value has been produced by "slow, bloated, inefficient software", I must disagree in the strongest possible terms. Producing "slow, bloated, inefficient software" is far, far preferable to not producing software at all.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    I would rather have no software or write the software myself than waste all the time of my life I've had to waste because of such shitty software, and it is indeed the case I've had to write such software from scratch because the alternatives were utter garbage. So we deeply, vehemently disagree.

vvanders 8y ago

That'd be like saying your end user should understand cache misses, however if you're starting a car design/repair shop you might want to know about how transmissions work. The primary reason for dropping down to native is to get better performance. If you're going to do that you'll leave 10x-50x performance on the table if you don't understand cache misses, prefetching and the other things that manual memory placement open up.

hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
I'm not going to play anymore metaphor/semantic games. It's nice that you did that project, but it's not at all necessary for someone to engage in that in order to understand performance issues.
- vvanders 8y ago
  You're the one that raised the metaphor, but okay? I'm not saying that you can't do performance work without having done that. Just that you'll be at a disadvantage since you're at the mercy of whatever your HW vendor decides to disclose to you. If you know this stuff you can work back from from first principals. With a high level memory architecture of a system(say tiled vs direct rendering GPU) you can reason about how certain operations will be fast and will be slow.
  - hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
    You're the one that raised the metaphor, but okay And your response was absurd. You don't rebuild a transmission in order to run a shop. You don't even rebuild a transmission as an engineer creating cars, you shop that out to an organization specializing in the extremely difficult task of designing and building transmissions. I wanted to avoid this waste of time, but here we are. As for the rest of your comment about reasoning about performance, none of that requires the work you did. Again, neat project (for you), but completely unnecessary in general.

Annatar 8y ago

It would be valid, though. A computer programmer must understand how a computer works lest she or he write slow, bloated, inefficient software.

lmm 8y ago
Given how many person-years have been saved and how much value has been produced by "slow, bloated, inefficient software", I must disagree in the strongest possible terms. Producing "slow, bloated, inefficient software" is far, far preferable to not producing software at all.
- Annatar 8y ago
  I would rather have no software or write the software myself than waste all the time of my life I've had to waste because of such shitty software, and it is indeed the case I've had to write such software from scratch because the alternatives were utter garbage. So we deeply, vehemently disagree.